Okta Expands Trust Platform

Todd McKinnon, CEO and Co-Founder, Okta had a strong opening keynote at Oktane19 with five new product announcements and four use cases shared by customers.

The five products:

1. Okta’s acquisition of ScaleFT last summer has resulted in Advanced Server Access, which brings contextual access management to secure cloud infrastructure. This marks Okta’s first big investment in the infrastructure level and demonstrates its opportunity to tackle identity beyond the application layer.
2. The Okta Identity Engine is a set of customizable building blocks that unlock any use case and starts with passwordless experiences, progressive profiling, and per-app branding.
3. Okta Hooks is a new platform functionality that gives developers the power to create unlimited integrations, even to third-party sources. These two functionalities enable Okta’s 6,100 customers to build trusted, tailored user journeys across an exponential number of use cases.
4. New risk-based authentication leverages machine learning (ML) to deliver greater security, ease of use, and automated detection and response to identity-based attacks. This is the first time Okta is introducing ML in its products, a different approach than many companies that are promoting their use of ML without the tech to back it up.
5. The new Okta Access Gateway solves hybrid IT access problem for enterprises, connecting on-premises applications to the Okta Identity Cloud, including Single Sign-On and Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication. The flexible deployment model gives enterprises the choice between deploying a proxy on-premises or through multiple IaaS vendors including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, Okta Access Gateway.

The following use cases were shared:

Ally Financial

Megan Crespi, CTO, Ally Financial shared how Ally was created by focusing on what customers needed and wanted from a bank. Ally is one of the first online-only digital banks. Mobile is a huge channel of choice for their customers and Megan says Ally has been a technology company from the beginning. They focus on developing products, services, and UX that improve customer experience (CX) and they look for partners to provide solutions to support and meet today’s security demands. Years ago, security and usability were an "either-or situation." Today, there’s understanding of the need for secure and seamless customer interfaces. Ally looks for partners that help them provide secure seamless access for customers. Security is at the center of CX. Reliability, scalability, and availability of the technology is the key to earn the peace of mind of the customer.

MLB.com

Neil Boland, CISO, MLB is responsible for both the digital and physical security of Major League Baseball since everything is interconnected. Trust is crucial from a brand standpoint. When they were coming out with a new MLB.com platform, they explored identity solutions and ended up going with Okta for fan identity since MLB employees had a good experience using Okta for employee identity. Since Opening Day last Thursday, the site is handling tens of millions of fans every day and opening day went off without a hitch. They were able to reduce friction allowing fans to move from device to device. Having a common identity platform for employees and fans is huge for MLB and is helping them meet and exceed their response time, latency, and CX KPIs. Data-driven security and identity are consistent with MLB's focus on data and analytics to evaluate player and team performance.

Personal Capital

Maxime Rousseau, CISO, Personal Capital a FinTech disrupter providing wealth management and personal finance services. It provides a platform to manage finances for free; as such, trust is critical — it's their currency and critical enabler. Personal Capital has been an earlier adopter of Advanced Server Access. They were looking for a solution to bring the authentication stack to zero-trust model. They baked agents into their servers, provisioned themselves, and used Workforce Identity. Okta has been a clean, low-friction security solution.

Twilio

Jeff Lawson, CEO and Co-founder, Twilio the cloud platform that allows developers to build communications into their applications. While Jeff was founding three other companies and working at AWS, it became clear to him that communications are critical to building great CX. Building and communications are what humans do better than any other species and that’s what Twilio facilitates. When founding Twlio, he wanted to be the system to facilitate amazing engagement. He began in 2008 before programmable APIs were well understood. Developers were becoming influential in the technology their companies pursued. Twilio enables companies and developers to build communications in their vision for their use cases. They make them able to do so in an afternoon.

Jeff believes experimentation is the key to innovation. More experiments = more impactful innovation. By providing a platform for developers to build communications, Twilio is bringing communications out of legacy networks with hardware to software. SaaS companies have been successful building the software and also operating it. Today, AWS is the fastest growing company and is selling IT infrastructure to enable developers and companies to build what they need. AWS makes a small amount of money every time your phone gets something from the web.

To innovate, ask customers how you can serve them better. Pay attention to what problems do you observe with the greatest frequency that need to be solved. Listen to customers and build innovative solutions. Bank contact centers are being built on top of Twilio replacing multiple physical call centers. Twilio listened and is enabling banks to take control of their roadmap by adding the plug-in features their clients want.

Key Takeaways

• Every company is a technology company, if you are not, you will be replaced.
• Move quickly, listen to customers, iterate, scale to be successful, and disruptive.
• Provide a platform you can trust to become trusted.