Okta - Serving and Loving our Customers to Deliver Secure Remote Access in a Critical Time
The recent events surrounded the global COVID-19 pandemic is forcing all of us to consider how we change the ways that we live and work. We're having regular conversations with our customers and partners about the impacts that this is having and we are looking for ways to love, empower and serve our customers in the midst of a very difficult time. Many of us at Okta have family members and dear friends who are at the forefront of providing guidance and care to those who are in desperate need at this time.
With the recent events surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic we are seeing a sense of urgency in organizations large and small looking to be able to securely and quickly adapt to the fast changing remote oriented environment requirements for their employees, partners and consumers. I wanted to take a few minutes to share some of the trends that we're seeing in organizations large and small in case it might provide some useful guidance to you and yours.
Recently we've worked with multiple large private and public sector companies who are looking to quickly provide remote access in a secure way so they can ensure secure productivity for their organizations. Some of these organizations are at the forefront of serving those who most need help in the midst of this pandemic. One of the trends that we're seeing is these organizations need to rapidly provide secure Zero-Trust access with not only Multi-Factor Authentication in front of their existing VPN's and legacy on premises applications, but also for the existing and new infrastructure, platform and software as a service offerings that they're leveraging in the cloud. Okta always recommends MFA to be deployed across the board to improve our security postures. We've seen organizations large and small roll out Okta SSO, MFA, HealthInsights and ThreatInsights and achieve massive time to value to keep their organizations running. These four offerings are a limited perspective on our robust set of offerings today, but I'd like for the purposes of this post to focus on these four.
One or our global customers recently had a very successful global deployment of Okta's Single Sign On and Multi-Factor Authentication with their VPN infrastructure, legacy and cloud applications for 300,000+ employees. Additionally they're able to achieve the value of Okta's Advanced Server Access product in protecting remote access of privileged users to their critical server infrastructure in the cloud. This customer instantly achieved value with Okta HealthInsights which delivers Dashboard level security best practices to Okta Administrators and in addition to all of this, this customer was able to get immediate value from the ThreatInsights capability. With ThreatInsights the CSO and security team was able to identify within hours of their go-live, 200,000+ attempted account takeovers coming from an unfriendly set of foreign actors. These account takeover attempts were on not only the employee base across the globe, but executives for this organization's hybrid deployment of on premises Microsoft Exchange and Office365 in the cloud. The security team was able to quickly identify malicious IPs and blacklist them, add informed intelligent and dynamic IP blocking decisions, prevent account takeovers and account locks and audit suspicious IP's with Okta's system log and their out of the box integration with Splunk the SIEM of their choice. The unique capabilities that Okta provides with ThreatInsights can only be achieved by pulling in signals from large numbers of data points and doing it with a true multi-tenant Identity as a Service offering that is born and built in the cloud. Silo'd on premises solutions cannot provide this level of insight or value.
This customer like many others are seeing quick successes of large global deployments for their workforces. This particular customer needed a very quick deployment of Office365 and on premises exchange for web based, mobile and desktop clients. Additionally this customer needed to deploy several new applications, infrastructure and services that would enable their organization to deliver on effective remote work for their workforce.
Time to value in our current environment is critical, and Okta is looking forward to continue to serve our existing and new customers by being the technology and business enabler. This particular customer is. now looking to deploy Okta to over 1,000 applications on premises and in the cloud over the next several weeks while also replacing a massive investment in their legacy identity provider solution by removing infrastructure, management, security, operational and certification costs.
Please reach out to myself or your local Okta team members if we can start to find opportunities to serve you and your stakeholders in this difficult time.