Okta Platform

For workforce identity management with Okta Platform , I mostly use it for the joiner, mover, and leaver process, and whenever it comes to the application, I am integrating SCIM provisioning to make the users aligned with the applications on the fly.

Regarding my main use case for Okta Platform, for access governance, I maintain all those certifications as well, and for non-human identities, I also manage them in Okta Platform itself.

Okta Platform's single sign-on and access provisioning features have helped my organization by being quite seamless. The user gets onboarded on the fly with Just-In-Time provisioning enabled, which helps propagate the users across the organizational applications.

The behavioral detection and threat detection features of Okta Platform are very good. They provide insights into the behavioral pattern of user access management and inform the administrator of any kind of intruder detections or threat analysis, making it very useful to use Okta Platform for maintaining identities.

Okta Platform has positively impacted my organization by bringing more automations with Okta Workflows, resulting in a drastic change in the manual efforts, as most things are being automated and Okta Platform is very convenient with their workflow management.

The impact on manual efforts with Okta Platform means that for some activities in my day-to-day business that used to take around an hour or two, it is now reduced to seconds, and I am getting things done much faster.

The needed improvements mostly pertain to the ISPM, especially in posture management.

This means that whenever there are changes or a change audit occurs, Okta Platform should provide details on what exactly is happening, who is making the change, what values are changed from past to the current one, providing more insight into the change audit process.

I find Okta Platform scalable, as it can easily handle more users or workloads as my organization grows.

I would rate the customer support a nine out of ten.

Okta Platform  was originally implemented to provide remote authentication for our hosted applications to authenticate against Active Directory for users accessing them from the internet. Then we started using it for multi-factor authentication for our remote access and VPN remote access. Now we have been looking at it for securing the desktops with multi-factor authentication.

Let me give you a specific example of how we use Okta Platform  in our environment. We do not allow access to our internal Active Directory. Our DMZ does not have access to our internal Active Directory. Any external application or hosted application that needs to authenticate users against Active Directory has never been able to do so because we do not allow these hosted applications or our DMZ to have access to our internal Active Directory servers. We block that kind of access for security concerns. Okta Platform is different because the Okta agents are configured to make outbound calls on our internal network, continuously polling for authentication requests. When they receive authentication requests, they then authenticate against our internal Active Directory servers. There is never any inbound traffic from the internet to our internal infrastructure. That was the main point which caused us to select Okta Platform many years ago. It was the only solution that worked this way. This allows authentication for external users without breaching any of our firewall rules, without needing any reverse proxy or any tunnels from the internet to our internal servers.

Okta Platform offers flexibility that was very useful. It allows us to have multi-domain and multi-tenant authentication with entities that we do not control, but still allows us to use a single set of authentication rules and security rules with Okta Platform that is also able to authenticate users from other entities to give them access to our resources, authentication-wise, but still allowing us to select and enforce our own security rules.

Okta Platform's best feature is the ability to authenticate users without needing any inbound connections to our secure internal Active Directory servers on our internal network. That is the main feature which caused us to select Okta Platform and will continue to use Okta Platform.

This feature impacts my daily operations by allowing us to use external applications which we would not have otherwise used because we would not have allowed authentication from the internet unless it was implemented the way Okta Platform implements it. Had we been forced to do so, we would have had to open what are called holes in our firewalls to allow for authentication and that would have dramatically decreased our security posture.

Okta Platform has positively impacted my organization by improving efficiency, security, and user satisfaction by allowing us to use external applications.

Okta Platform can be improved by lowering the price, as the price is very high.

Besides pricing, there are other things I think could be improved with Okta Platform, such as the strength against distributed attacks from the internet. We would like more flexibility and the ability to stop attacks when there is password spraying or brute forcing accounts. There is work that can be done there to improve the features.

I have been using Okta Platform for about ten years or possibly longer.

Okta Platform is stable, but it can have issues with downtime or reliability.

Okta Platform's customer support has been average in my experience. We handle most issues ourselves, so approximately once every few years we have to contact support, and it has been neither good nor bad.

Okta Platform was the first and only solution I used; I did not previously use a different solution.

I have not seen a return on investment as an IT administrator who deals with security, not the financials.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Okta Platform is that it is expensive and complicated. We do not handle purchasing ourselves as we have a purchasing department that takes care of all the paperwork. For us, it is just an upfront cost that is excessive.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing Okta Platform as it was more than ten years ago. However, we did evaluate alternatives, and Okta Platform was the only one that matched our requirements to authenticate without any connectivity to our internal network.

My advice to others looking into using Okta Platform is to not discount the fact that authentication can be made without any connectivity to the internal network, as that was critical for us. I give this product a rating of nine out of ten.