Okta: Providing More Secure and Seamless Experiences for UBM

Loukas Vrettos: UBM is about 3,750 users across EMEA, US and Asia. We are events based company, so we do business to business events. Our vision is to become our leading business to business events company across the globe.

Loukas Vrettos: UBM has a shared service, IT service, and the main purpose of that is to standardize the technology across all the regions. For us, the aim has been single platforms across all regions to enable our users to collaborate much easier.

Loukas Vrettos: Before us, there's been a journey in terms of how UBM has transformed from a silo company across the globe to a more organized, kind of standard organization across each region. And that transformation of the company had similar effect to IT.

Loukas Vrettos: I used to be running the EMEA side and EMEA had about three companies at the time that they were just separate. UBM has changed that and ensured that there is a single company that everyone operates, with a single CIO in each region, and that brought challenges for us.

Loukas Vrettos: There were two challenges we were trying to address. The first was that we were putting systems with the cloud and we wanted to have multifactor authentication for all of them, and the second was that our users were constantly having different passwords thrown to them from viral systems, so the single sign on element was a requirement that we wanted to address.

Loukas Vrettos: We had to find the solution that can address that, and we chose Okta basically because the integration that has our values solutions like email platforms and CRMs and remote access solutions that enable us to put multifactor authentication to our users, using their mobile devices, also allows us to simplify the user interaction with virus programs. In the old days people had to know several passwords. Now they just look into their laptop and then everything is seamless for them, which is really great for security but also for user experience.

Loukas Vrettos: From a user perspective, we are focused on making our users more productive, more easier for them to interact with our technology. For us, one thing that Okta starts addressing now is changing the passwords when they are not in our systems. So that's a great feature. I like the authentication approve-deny, when you authenticate so you don't have to put a digit, you just click on your button, which is great.

Loukas Vrettos: From an administration point of view, when you try to integrate there's a huge list of applications that are ready to integrate and there are quite good instructions for someone to follow to set this up, so that's good stuff as well.

Loukas Vrettos: Our business recognized the importance of technology and they have done that recently with awarding my group the Collaboration Technology of the Year Award for our email delivery platform. I guess Okta had something to do with it because it allowed people to authenticate much easier.

Loukas Vrettos: EMEA and US have 2,600 employees and the application we put in place originally had about 600 employees using Okta. The nature of the application was all or nothing if addressed overnight, 2,600 employees. One thing I like about Okta is we engage with Okta when Okta was a growing company. That comes with vetted engagement. It's not colossal technology company, it's still growing, that allows them to have focus to their customers, and I feel we have that with Okta.