Okta Administration: Up and Running

Lovisa Stenbacken Stjernlof, HenkJan de Vries

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781800569539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Cyber Security
• Index: Computer Science

Plan, design, and implement identity and access management solutions with OktaKey Features• Learn how to use Okta for complete identity and access management in your organization• Use single sign-on, multifactor authentication, and life cycle management for enhanced security• Set up, manage, and audit API access policiesBook DescriptionIAM, short for identity and access management, is a set of policies and technologies for ensuring the security of an organization through careful role and access assignment for users and devices. With this book, you'll get up and running with Okta, an identity and access management (IAM) service that you can use for both employees and customers. Once you've understood how Okta can be used as an IAM platform, you'll learn about the Universal Directory, which covers how to integrate other directories and applications and set up groups and policies. As you make progress, the book explores Okta's single sign-on (SSO) feature and multifactor authentication (MFA) solutions. Finally, you will delve into API access management and discover how you can leverage Advanced Server Access for your cloud servers and Okta Access Gateway for your on-premises applications. By the end of this Okta book, you'll have learned how to implement Okta to enhance your organization's security and be able to use this book as a reference guide for the Okta certification exam.What you will learn• Understand different types of users in Okta and how to place them in groups• Set up SSO and MFA rules to secure your IT environment• Get to grips with the basics of end-user functionality and customization• Find out how provisioning and synchronization with applications work• Explore API management, Access Gateway, and Advanced Server Access• Become well-versed in the terminology used by IAM professionalsWho this book is forIf you are an IT consultant, business decision-maker, system administrator, system and security engineer, or anyone who wishes to use Okta to plan, design, and implement identity and access management solutions, this book is for you. A basic understanding of authentication and authorization is necessary.

Section 1: Getting Started with Okta

In this section, you will learn what IAM and Okta are, and why they're important. You will also learn everything you need to know about Okta's basic features: Universal Directory (UD), Single Sign-On (SSO), Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (AMFA), and Life Cycle Management (LCM).

This part of the book comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, IAM and Okta
• Chapter 2, Working with Universal Directory
• Chapter 3, Single Sign-On for a Great End User Experience
• Chapter 4, Increasing Security with Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication
• Chapter 5, Automating Using Life cycle Management
• Chapter 6, Customizing Your Okta GUI

Chapter 1: IAM and Okta

Okta is an important, platform-agnostic set of services to help organizations with efficient and modern Identity and Access Management (IAM). One of Okta's most important strengths is its ability to work with a variety of platforms and integrate its features and services into various platforms' own solutions to provide seamless IAM. This strength has made Okta the leader in its field, and important to us when managing our organization's systems, to ensure easy and efficient user account management.

In this chapter, we'll learn about Okta and its features. This information will serve as the foundation with which to approach this book and pick up the skills we require to integrate Okta into our systems and learn how to use it in the best way possible. In this chapter, we'll explore the following topics:

• The origins of Okta
• Exploring Okta
• Okta's basic features
• Okta's advanced features

Exploring the origins of Okta

Okta was started by Todd McKinnon (CEO) and Frederic Kerrest (COO), former Salesforce employees. They saw that the cloud wasn't just a product for the big leagues. They predicted it would be necessary for anyone who would want to grow their business. They started the business in the middle of the 2008 recession, with Andreessen Horowitz investing as one of the first capital injections for Okta in 2010. In 2017, Okta went public with its IPO and valuation of $1.2 billion.

The name Okta is derived from the unit of measurement for clouds covering the sky at any given moment. On the scale, 0 okta is a clear blue sky and 8 oktas is completely overcast. The wordplay of Okta (in Greek, octa is 8) and the fact that Okta wants to cover all of the cloud access by becoming the identity standard, thus creating a completely overcast sky (8 oktas), is well thought out.

Since Okta came into the space of IAM, they have steadily grown to the leading vector and have been on top for the last three consecutive years, bypassing giants such as Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Their take on being completely vendor-neutral has allowed them to gain customers big and small, across all verticals. This particular focus makes sure that Okta can allow all applications, without being tied to or biased toward any relationship or partnership. This gives the customer complete freedom in choice, setup, and a combination of tools.

In recent years, Okta has been socially active, taking the 1% pledge—committing time, product, and equity to give back to the community, but also supporting non-profit efforts in different ways. As Okta understands what it is like to start up and grow, during their annual conference in 2019, they announced an investment fund of $50 million dollars under the name Okta Ventures to help other start-ups in the identity and security sector to ramp up and grow.

Understanding IAM and Okta

IAM has the following components:

• Manage the roles of individual users within an organization.
• Manage the privileges they have to access company resources while using context.
• Configure scenarios to determine whether access is granted or denied.

Beyond this simple definition, IAM can do much more:

• It orchestrates the user's life cycle during their time within the company.
• It is constantly determined whether access is allowed within company policies and rules to gain access to needed resources, content, and data, using the best available security features.

The time of perimeters is behind us. Organizations can no longer just trust their networks and secure access mainly through their infrastructure. Nowadays, access is needed from every device to every application, at any given moment, with any reason or intent. This shows that security needs are dynamic and their requirements are evolving.

The outdated directory is being replaced by different tools, and all have to be maintained, secured, and fortified outside of the comfort of the company's network. This is bringing a lot of extra consolidating and rethinking around the concept of using the cloud, but also, how to manage it all for the workforce.

Thus, a new era started, where new IAM solutions were born in the cloud and existing solutions started a shift toward the cloud. This didn't mean that every organization all of sudden dropped its network and pushed everything and everyone to the cloud. Vendors had to become hybrid, delivering tools to connect the ground to the cloud with integrations. By consolidating the two, slowly the shift started to pick up pace and organizations began to understand the possibilities of using tools such as Okta as their IAM solution.

Exploring Okta

A complete user and system management setup isn't just in one product, nor is it one vendor. A complete view of all sections within and outside of the organization is best done by utilizing different tools.

This combination and their deep integrations make it possible to create a fine-knit layer of security and insights on top of everything, flexible enough to allow exceptions, but strong enough to fight off anything considered harmful to the users, content, data, or organization.

An IAM system can be seen as a collection of different elements and tools to deliver this. It can be considered that the following functionalities are part of, but not limited to, an organization's toolkit:

• A password vault to store and maintain access to applications and systems. This can be advanced by using protocols that allow Single Sign-On (SSO).
• Provisioning integrations to create and manage user identities within directories, applications, databases, and infrastructure.
• Security enforcement applications to secure access to applications, as well as securing the data of these systems and others.
• Unified reporting systems that allow fine-grained insight into the array of tools to create oversight and better knowledge of what is happening within and outside of the corporate network.

Okta is capable of delivering all of these functionalities for organizations large and small across any business vertical and within cost-effective boundaries.

By staying true to their form, they are capable of excelling in being non-vendor focused and an agnostic system. Allowing any application vendor to create integrations with Okta, and delivering applications broadly on request from customers, Okta has been able to grow their reach to over 6,500 pre-built and maintained integrations. While creating these integrations, Okta also invested heavily in delivering more and more functionality toward ground-to-cloud visibility and launched their Okta Access Gateway product.

Looking further than users, the world...

Table of contents

• Okta Administration: Up and Running
• Why subscribe?
• Preface
• Section 1: Getting Started with Okta
• Chapter 1: IAM and Okta
• Chapter 2: Working with Universal Directory
• Chapter 3: Single Sign-On for a Great End User Experience
• Chapter 4: Increasing Security with Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication
• Chapter 5: Automating Using Life Cycle Management
• Chapter 6: Customizing Your Okta GUI
• Section 2: Extending Okta
• Chapter 7: API Management
• Chapter 8: Managing Access with Advanced Server Access
• Chapter 9: Leveraging Access Gateway for Your On-Premises Applications
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