BetterCloud provides enhanced functionality for Okta customers using Microsoft Office 365

BetterCloud, the leading SaaS Operations Management platform, announced at Oktane19 the availability of enhanced functionality to support Okta customers using Microsoft Office 365.

Customers leveraging Okta’s identity management capabilities to connect users to Microsoft Office 365 can now use BetterCloud to secure user interactions and activities within the application including monitoring settings and configurations, securing onboarding / offboarding and protecting sensitive data.

Additionally, BetterCloud is announcing that a year after the launch of their partnership at Oktane18, over 400 customers are now using both Okta and BetterCloud. Joint customers include leading companies such as Bird and Juul Labs.

Once a user has logged into SaaS applications via Okta, IT & security teams are then responsible for monitoring and securing every interaction, data object access and configuration settings — including data sharing permissions, groups management, assigning resources, and more — within those applications.

With this enhanced functionality for Microsoft Office 365, BetterCloud is giving IT & security administrators granular control over these interactions and orchestrating routine security onboarding / offboarding processes with custom workflows — all while providing end users with a frictionless experience.

“From secure connections to secure interactions, the integration of Okta and BetterCloud’s complementary technologies provides organizations using Microsoft Office 365 with a strong policy management solution that securely and effectively authenticates, provisions and governs configurations, settings and data across their Microsoft Office 365 workloads,” said Shreyas Sadalgi, Chief Business Strategy Officer of BetterCloud.

“IT administrators can now provide users secure access to Microsoft Office 365 applications from any device and all user interactions within those applications are being properly monitored and secured. Our partnership with Okta makes security and IT operations easier for the mutual customers who’ve placed their trust in us.”

Features and benefits of BetterCloud’s enhanced functionality for Microsoft Office 365 include:

• Security threat remediation: BetterCloud’s continuous monitoring of Microsoft Office 365 enables security teams to view user and application related security incidents. Security teams can view detailed context of the user and their profile, and quickly remediate threats via a centralized list of Microsoft Office 365 administrator actions.
• Secure offboarding policies: IT can now fully set up and automate all of the steps needed to securely onboard and offboard users in Microsoft Office 365. Build custom workflows across Okta’s universal directory and BetterCloud to automate everything from user access to account permissions, device management, email rules management, and group membership. By leveraging automation, BetterCloud and Okta help organizations reduce the security threats associated with human error in these routine and historically manual processes.
• Insights on usage: Report on users’ login activity and identify unused Microsoft Office 365 licenses. IT can now create automated policies to offboard a user and remove the license if a user does not login for a set period of time, ensuring the organization is not spending money on unused licenses.

“Okta’s vision is to enable any organization to use any technology, and in our most recent Businesses @ Work report, the most commonly used app across the Okta Integration Network was Microsoft Office 365,” said Monty Gray, senior vice president of Corporate Development, Okta.

“Okta serves an important role as the authentication layer to grant access to apps like Microsoft Office 365, and through BetterCloud, our joint customers are able to ensure user interactions are air tight and that data is in the right hands.”

“Directory management and custom workflows have made our onboarding and offboarding tasks simple and efficient,” said Reginald Taylor-Johnson, IT Support Specialist at JUUL Labs.

“Having the ability to both prevent unauthorized access and understand what’s going on inside the application to ensure data is secure is a game changer for us and we couldn’t imagine doing business without it.”

“The relationship between Okta and BetterCloud has enabled me to create an environment that is safe, automated, and mapped to a level of attribution granularity that encourages continuous technical innovation for the purpose of improving our level of security and overall visibility over what we do at Bird,” said Peter Barnett Systems Administrator at Bird.