Okta Unfurls Cloud Access Service

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon says that part of the challenge that IT organizations face when confronted with cloud computing is that there is no “center of gravity." That means, he says, there is no central administration console via which they can allocate who has the rights to use what particular service.

The Okta service provides a single sign-on facility that allows users to access all the services they have permission to use without having to separately log into each service, adds McKinnon.

The alternative to the Okta service is for the IT organization to try and build its own portal, which it would then have to update and maintain. McKinnon says the Okta service is designed to take that task off the plate of IT by eliminating the need for IT organizations to extend custom access control interfaces out of various cloud services, while still providing the business with usage trails that can be audited for compliance and budgetary purposes.

To that end, the Okta service is already connected to hundreds of cloud computing services and makes available analytics tools and canned reports to provide that information, McKinnon says.