Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Okta?

Identity and access management is at the heart of modern cybersecurity. For Okta, a company with global reach and growing ambition in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, the mission is simple: make user authentication more secure and seamless for both enterprises and consumers.

"We're a pure cloud service - that's why we wanted to make sure that the name itself stands out as well," explained Jeff Hall, Okta's Sales Engineer Manager for APAC. Hall joined the APAC team in its early days, and has witnessed the company's rapid regional expansion first-hand.

As more businesses move operations to the cloud, securing digital identities has never been more critical. Okta offers an array of products and services across two main segments: workforce identity (for employees, partners, and contractors) and customer identity (for end-users and consumers). "Okta provides product and offerings over two segments or use cases. One is the workforce, and the other one is the customer identity, or what people might call CIAM - customer identity and access management," Hall said.

On the workforce side, Okta aims to address the complex needs of organisations grappling with disparate systems, applications, and user personas. "Okta is normally used by organisations as an identity or security as a service, where Okta unifies the different multiple personas within an organisation," Hall explained. This unification allows companies to impose consistent, yet flexible, security policies based on users' roles.

One of its core offerings is a streamlined, single sign-on experience. Once authenticated, users gain access to all applications and systems they're entitled to. "Once unified, an organisation can apply uniform and flexible security policies based on what their role they perform within the organisation," Hall noted.

Okta also incorporates multi-factor authentication (MFA) as a key security feature. "The enforcement of the higher challenge, or what we call multi-factor authentication, is also provided by Okta," Hall said, explaining how Okta enables organisations to prompt users for additional proof of identity using industry-standard methods. MFA can range from low-assurance methods, such as SMS or email codes, to high-assurance factors like biometrics. "Okta factors in usability as part of security - we want to make sure any security initiative an organisation rolls out can be successful," he added.

In addition to its cloud-first ethos, Okta recognises that many companies still rely on a hybrid mix of cloud and on-premises applications. To address these realities, Hall said, "In order for Okta to address those requirements, Okta has built capability that addresses the hybrid office management, which governs all access across anywhere, right, and the product aimed for that is what we call Okta Access Gateway."

Lifecycle management, which automates provisioning and de-provisioning users as they join or leave an organisation, is another key service. "Through this approach, manual intervention or user intervention can now be removed or eradicated, thus freeing your users from this manual task which will allow them to gain more productivity," Hall explained.

For those looking to secure customer identities and build services atop the Okta platform, the firm offers modular capabilities. "All capabilities I mentioned earlier are actually exposed as features or functionalities that can be triggered by API and SDKs," Hall said. "The good thing with the CIAM use case is that Okta is now used — rather than as a security or ID service, it's now being used as a platform as a service, wherein any organisation can build their application or platform on top of Okta," he added.

When it comes to infrastructure, Okta leverages global hyperscalers. "Okta leverages AWS as its infrastructure provider," Hall confirmed. "Hence we can provide our customers the assurance of the availability, the scaling and uptimes of the service. Okta recently has announced — as actually last year — that the office service has a committed uptime, an SLA of 99.99 [percent] or four nines, meaning no other identity vendor has achieved the four nines during that time."

This commitment to resilience and availability is matched with an expanding presence on the ground in APAC. Hall reflected on his own journey: "When I started, we were just 30 people within Australia, but fast forward to 2021, Okta now has additional global offices on top of the main one which is Australia, which I'm sitting in. These offices are like Singapore, Japan, Korea, and we're still growing, right, and as a result of the expansion, the team has quadrupled in size. Right now, we're 120 plus and still growing."

Okta's business functions, from sales to engineering and support, are represented in every region. "This shows that our vision and mission to global expansion, and we want to make sure every customer is properly taken care of. I'm very fortunate again to be part of that motion," Hall said.

For enterprise end-users and developers looking to engage with Okta, the firm offers a range of multilingual, digital channels. Users can reach out via website, chat, email, or voice. "Whether you're enterprise or small business, we actually take care of two segments of the market," Hall said. "From an engagement standpoint, to start off with, Okta provides a global website which is now translated into multiple languages like English, French, German, Japanese - and our digital presence allows any customer to talk to us either by chat, email, or voice."

Additionally, Hall noted that potential clients can sign up for a free trial to evaluate Okta's platform and be contacted by a sales team member at their convenience. "In summary, Okta provides multiple channels on how we can help our customers," he said.

As Okta continues to expand its footprint in APAC and beyond, Hall remains optimistic about the company's role in shaping the future of secure digital identity. "We want to make sure each customer is properly taken care of," he said.