Last week we invited several CIOs and IT leaders in the Bay Area to hear first-hand from two of our fantastic customers who use Okta to better manage their IT in the cloud.  This was the second in a series of events we have organized to engage with other cloud first IT leaders and connect them with Okta customers that have made the move outside the firewall.

Ken Stineman, senior director of computing and IT at Genomic; and Mark Brennan, senior director of IT at Pandora, were gracious enough to talk about their specific their IT businesses needs and answer questions about how Okta has helped them lead their IT departments and their companies into the cloud.

The morning was all about the issues facing today’s CIO as they think about their cloud strategies: What are their IT needs? How do their businesses handle the shift toward the cloud? And how can Okta help them manage and secure their IT infrastructure as they make this move to the cloud.

Genomic, like many other mid-sized companies, was a big Microsoft shop and used many Microsoft products from the desktop out to the datacenter.  Ken in particular discussed how Okta has helped him make that transition from a Microsoft-centric, behind the firewall infrastructure to one that spans several new vendors and is much more cloud-centric.  He also explained why security is so crucial at Genomic, a molecular diagnostics company. Genomic handles a lot of sensitive data, and Ken mentioned how Okta helps securely handle the company’s IT needs. Critical to his transition from Microsoft to the cloud, Ken also spoke about Okta’s simple integration with Active Directory.

Pandora’s situation was different in that their background and timeline enabled them to build an IT infrastructure that is almost entirely cloud-centric.   It is only now as their growth is accelerating that they are thinking about introducing Active Directory into their environment.   Mark lauded Okta’s ease of use, pre-integrated applications, and centralized administrative capabilities that have made it possible for them to scale a cloud first IT environment using Okta as their central source of truth and directory to control access and authorization.

Thanks again to both Ken and Mark for participating – the feedback from their peers was great and I think the overall event was a huge hit.