Okta expands customer identity and access management offerings to improve security for users

Okta announced continued growth and advancements in both Okta’s and Auth0’s Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM) offerings. The team unveiled new capabilities from Okta’s Customer Identity products, including Device Authorization Grant, Branding, and Custom Administrator Roles.

The development time and continuous optimization required to deliver digital experiences across devices and applications is increasingly burdensome and complex for companies in today’s marketplaces. It requires customization per application, specific coding, and additional security measures to protect against the evolving threat environment.

The risk of security and deterioration of the end user experience is a key challenge. Identity is the common foundation on which organizations can build both secure and frictionless experiences. A new era of identity-first security has emerged as a result and is driving demand for CIAM. Early adopters of CIAM now have a distinct competitive edge.

Okta’s acquisition and continued investment in Auth0 is at the center of this growing demand and massive $30 billion market opportunity for CIAM. Okta announced its plan to operate as one combined company, with two CIAM product units across both Okta and Auth0, providing customers with more choice in how they want to deploy CIAM.

Okta and Auth0 enable organizations to deploy digital customer-facing experiences that overlay security, governance, privacy, and engagement policies throughout a customer journey, without making tradeoffs to usability. The growth of each platform and the benefits they bring to varied use cases is why Okta will continue to invest in both.

Continued investment in Okta’s CIAM offering includes the release of key new capabilities, including:

• Device Authorization Grant: Simplify and secure the registration and access for end users across input-constrained, shared, and IoT devices (like Smart TV apps, smart speakers, kiosks, and terminals), improving user-experience, reducing abandoned registrations, and increasing security for users regardless of interface.
• Branding: Communicate with confidence and go live faster with consistent branding across login, error pages, and email templates without wasting hours of developer time. Customers can deploy their brand templates without adding custom code, ultimately providing ease of implementation.
• Custom Administrator Roles: Spend less time on the governance of who has access to what and more time focusing on the challenges that will drive businesses forward. Enable Super Admins to follow the principle of least privilege by creating granular roles for admins to manage their users, groups, and applications. Easily apply a flexible approach to administration that fits each unique organization structure, ensuring each admin has the right level of access they require.

Okta’s Customer Identity platform currently serves leading enterprises including Crate & Barrel, Albertsons Companies, and JetBlue.

“Verisk is a leading data analytics provider serving customers in insurance, energy and specialized markets, and financial services,” said Atul Bahl, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure, Verisk Analytics. “As a data-focused organization, security is of the utmost importance to us. Okta’s Custom Administrator Roles allow us to follow the principle of least privilege and only grant admins access to the tasks they need to perform across our many business units. We save time for our internal teams and ensure the best-in-class security of our customer applications.”

“Identity sits at the core of all digital experiences and provides the security, agility, and usability needed to quickly adapt to any current or future challenge,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder, Okta. “Together, Okta and Auth0 deliver the most comprehensive approach to customer identity. We are investing in and supporting both platforms, and we are proud to empower our customers to choose with confidence.”

Availability

Okta’s new features, including Device Authorization Grant, Branding, and Custom Administrator Roles, are all available now in early access. Customers can opt-in to use all three new capabilities in the Okta Admin Dashboard. Device Authorization Grant and Branding will be generally available in Q4 2021 and Custom Administrator Roles will be generally available in Q2 2022.