Okta and Workplace from Meta
One thing that we at Cloudworks like to see is that Okta and Workplace from Meta are now working closely together to make integration and provisioning to Workplace even easier. We have, for a long time, recommended Okta as one of the preferred solutions for those who need to take their identity management into the cloud, and now Workplace from Meta is doing the same.
You can read more here about how we integrated Workplace from Meta with Okta’s IAM solution for the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Barack Obama’s appearance was a highlight
It is undeniable that one of the highlights of the conference was the conversation that Todd McKinnon, Okta’s CEO, had with Barack Obama. They talked about digital challenges and visions of how we can solve the tasks we have to contend with. In addition, Obama gave some insights into his time in the White House, as well as how it is today. Retelling everything he told is enough to fill several articles, so I’ll simply summarize it by acknowledging how much respect I have for people who can choose dialogue rather than monologue as a solution methodology.
New functionality in Okta
Okta, naturally, uses Oktane as an arena to launch news and improvements. It’s interesting to see that Okta as a product continues to become more advanced and mature.
Furthermore, I have outlined some of the things I noticed:
- Improvements in the identity engine – Okta has a lot of goodies in the pipeline to make handling and automation of identity processes richer and more complex. We are talking here, for example, about sending notifications to users that their account is about to expire soon, a more powerful rule engine to assign groups, access, and applications, the introduction of enumeration attributes and attributes with stricter access permissions.
- Password-free login – With more and more authentication mechanisms available, both explicit as a smartphone app and SMS token, as well as more hidden as device identification and geographic evaluation, we can begin to do secure authentication without using traditional passwords
- «Sign in with Okta» – Just as we see, for example, “Sign in with Meta” or “Sign in with Google” in online stores and other services used by individuals, Okta aims to become a cross-organizational identity provider in the business world.
The “little” extra
Keynotes, presentations, and roundtables are the mainstay of the conference. Also, I had a good and useful conversations with both employees of Okta, customers of Cloudworks and other partners who were also at the conference.
Of the more spontaneous experiences, I experienced that added the little extra was the Okta Developer Hub. Okta increasingly rich APIs and toolkits to build solutions that benefit from Okta functionality in a variety of ways and that can be used to create powerful integrations. At the Okta Developer Hub, you could stroll around whether you wanted to have a good chat about challenges you have encountered, or embark on “The Okta Developer Challenge”. The latter was a programming task where you won an Okta hooded jacket if you managed to build a quick solution that used Okta for login and federation. I won one!
Oktane18 delivered on every level – and was even better than I expected. A big thank you to Okta and everyone who made Oktane18 a brilliant experience – hope to see you in San Francisco next year for Oktane19!
Arne together with Brian in Okta after winning a hooded jacket
