Access Management, Identity Governance and Privileged Access Features Converge in New Okta Cloud Tools

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Today's workforce knows no borders. Organizations no longer have full-time employees: they have a much larger ecosystem that includes a variety of contractors and partners.

Ultimately, this means that more devices, from more locations, are accessing corporate resources like never before.

"In this borderless world, not only do you need to secure access to these resources from outside your own network and organization, but you also need to be able to manage access to them" , said Sagnik Nandy, President and CEO. CDO for Workforce Identity at Okta.

And, traditionally, businesses have often invested in disjointed tools, then quickly and sadly discovered that they weren't able to keep up with modern business.

“It requires too many custom integrations and handoffs, and also leads to poor user experience, which in turn hinders user adoption,” Nandy said. "Silos and low adoption rates limit visibility, and security vulnerabilities persist."

That's the dilemma Okta aims to solve with Okta Workforce Identity Cloud. The company unveiled the unified identity tool at its annual Oktane22 conference this week.

The Workforce Identity Cloud provides a single plane of control for IT and security teams to manage the identity of enterprise resources and users, "which has become increasingly difficult in a borderless world ", said Nandy.

The tool unifies the "three pillars of modern identity management" into a single pane of control: IAM, Identity Governance and Administration (IGA), and Privileged Access Management (PAM).

It includes Okta Identity Governance, which simplifies the process of requesting and granting access to resources, allowing IT teams to ensure that only the right users have access to specific resources. It also includes Okta Privileged Access, which secures highly privileged credentials for administrator and root accounts. And, it gives administrators the tools to harden the security of privileged resources, monitor and log privileged access, and run detailed compliance reports for auditors, Nandy said.

The tool provides an orchestration layer that leverages automation and provides visibility and control of corporate identities, Nandy said, and can attract third-party signals.

All in all, Workforce Identity Cloud integrates with the entire security stack and helps IT teams manage access for all use cases, Nandy said. This can help eliminate trade-offs between user experience and security, and IT and workforce can become "more agile and more productive."

Nandy emphasized that Okta is independent and neutral, which makes it compatible with thousands of applications, users, devices, operating systems and infrastructure providers. And, the company continues to research new use cases for identity-related business challenges, he said.

"Given the rise of multicloud and the continued adoption of a broad and deep ecosystem of SaaS applications, identity solutions for privileged and non-privileged users really need to span the entire landscape. technology choices, or risk creating the kinds of identity silos that lead to security vulnerabilities,” Nandy said.

Identity Access Management (IAM) is a framework that ensures the right users have the access they should have (or not have) to an organization's technology resources. And, with the average cost of a data breach at an all-time high of $4.35 million, demand for (IAM) tools like Okta's continues to grow. Fortune Business Insights puts the market on track to reach $34.52 billion in 2028, from $13.41 billion in 2021 (a CAGR of 14.5%).

Okta, which competes for market share with Oracle, IBM, SailPoint and Azure, among others, is looking to take IAM to a new level, and also to converge access management, governance of identities and privileged access.

Okta Workforce Identity Cloud targets a wide range of identity needs, but Nandy particularly pointed to the many inherent risks posed by persistent privileges. In other words, when privileged accounts or users have permanent access to critical infrastructure...