Okta Platform

I have hands-on experience with Okta Platform  for a little over three years, starting in 2023, integrating SaaS apps with SAML, OIDC, enabling MFA, including WebAuthn and FIDO2, and building group-based assignments.

Since then, I have day-to-day admin tasks including app onboarding, policy tuning, certificate and metadata rotation, lifecycle automation, HR-driven processes, and troubleshooting SSO  issues end-to-end, including IDP  and SP log attribute mapping and role entitlements.

The main use case is centralized SSO  and MFA for internal apps with event-driven lifecycle automation and JML to enforce least privilege and clean deprovisioning. Some examples from a typical day include onboarding new hires every morning via HR events from Workday , ensuring the right access is provided and provisioning automatically to enforce MFA while keeping auditors happy regarding least privilege and SOD.

The HR trigger, such as Workday  pushing a new hire to our IAM  workflow, allows Okta Platform  to serve as the IDP  and source for app access, mapping job codes and departments to Okta Platform groups, such as sales to US finance analyst, while integrating apps toward Snowflake  with read-only permissions. After integrating apps, the SSO setup gets done with SAML or OIDC protocols with Okta Platform as the IDP, validating NameID, subject format, sign, and encrypt settings while rotating all SP or IDP certificates as per schedule.

Subsequently, MFA and conditional access are arranged where policies require Okta Verify push on everything we engage with. We also manage attribute governance by maintaining profile mapping, including username, email ID, and department entitlements. App rules are assigned via groups, followed by monitoring and troubleshooting, ensuring a smooth deprovisioning process. For leavers, Workday termination revokes Okta Platform account and app assignments immediately, resulting in new hires being productive on day one while keeping admin efforts low and long ticket trails rare.

Automation has acted as a force multiplier for my workload and my team's efficiency. We moved from ticket-driven manual steps to a predictable policy-driven flow, making onboarding faster, cleaner, and far less noisy.

Okta Platform has positively impacted my organization through measurable risk reduction, faster onboarding, and fewer tickets. The concrete data indicates that the onboarding cycle time reduced by 50 to 60%, from one to two working days down to two to four hours for most SaaS apps. The day-one access rate has increased from 78 to 96%, with a relative score for new hires having required apps by 9:00 AM on their start date. Furthermore, the ticket volumes have fallen by 30 to 40% over the quarter.

The best features offered by Okta Platform that stand out most to me in my day-to-day work include Universal Directory and profile mapping, which matter as they form the foundation for clean attribute-driven access. I can normalize identities from HR and AD, map attributes once, and drive consistent entitlement across apps.

Additionally, features including group rules, dynamic assignments, SSO with robust protocols supporting SAML and various OIDC integrations, excellent provisioning, deprovisioning capabilities, adaptive MFA, WebAuthn, and efficient system and troubleshooting tools also stand out.

Universal Directory and profile mapping help me with day-to-day identity management by serving as the backbone for keeping identity data clean, consistent, and automation-friendly. Practically, Universal Directory acts as a single source of truth for users, allowing us to aggregate attributes from HR, Workday, AD, and other sources into a single Okta Platform user profile. This normalization standardizes formats, such as email in lowercase and phone numbers in E.164, preventing downstream apps from breaking due to case sensitivity or formatting.

Profile mapping enables me to transform attributes once, such as concatenating first.last for usernames, deriving different manager emails, and reusing them across all apps. This creates clean, predictable attributes driving group rules, which in turn govern app assignments and SCIM provisioning, making the JML process work efficiently without the need for tickets.

Okta Platform Integration Network's capability to enable faster deployments serves as a force multiplier for speed and risk reduction when it is mature and well-curated. It essentially turns a lot of custom work into configuration, which results in gains in deployment speed and reliability.

I assess the role of Universal Directory as a single source of truth for user identities in my organization as central to how we enforce identity hygiene and drive automated access. Its role functions as an authoritative profile and policy engine that normalizes identity data and pushes clean, consistent attributes downstream. We utilize it for data aggregation, normalization, profile mapping and precedence, attribute-driven access, federation claims, and policy enforcement. The measured outcomes with Universal Directory in the middle indicate that onboarding lifecycle durations dropped by more than 30 to 40%, with late access-related tickets falling by the same percentage, around 35 to 40%.

Although I am a fan of Okta Platform overall, there are areas where it could improve security outcomes and reduce admin friction. My top improvement areas include the system log and analytics upgrade, which are great for point troubleshooting, but trending and root cause analysis across large tenants still require exporting to SIEM . Verbose queries and long-range retention costs can add up. Additionally, while certificate rotations are better than most, the process is still manual for busy portfolios, especially concerning multi-SP SAML certificate rotations and app metadata drift.

Two more buckets of potential improvements for Okta Platform involve user experience and security. There is the issue of push fatigue and prompt sprawl, where users receive multiple prompts across different apps and sessions.

I arrived at the rating of eight because the core controls are strong and reliable, but a few operational UX and UI gaps prevent it from being rated higher. The reasons for not giving it a nine or ten include ongoing issues concerning safety and change safety, the complexity of group rules and mappings, and the lack of robustness in policy management. Additionally, there remains a need for more manual involvement than necessary, especially for large portfolios and dual certificate rotation, along with proactive SP data metadata validation.

I have been working in my current field since April 2023, with a little over three years of experience in that time.

Okta Platform is stable on an enterprise scale; however, scalability ultimately depends on how one architects and operates the system.

The scalability of Okta Platform is impressive, but its effectiveness relies on how integrations are designed, rate limits are handled, and day-to-day operations are managed. Customer support is generally reliable, featuring clear tiers with excellent assistance during roll-outs if the right plan is chosen and SLAs are well defined. Best outcomes emerge when paired with strong internal runbooks and partner support.

Overall, customer support tends to be dependable, but the real experience will depend on the support tier selected and the level of preparedness.

Before adopting Okta Platform, we utilized a homegrown SSO system employing ADFS for certain apps and direct LDAP binds for others, alongside a few apps with local accounts.

Automated lifecycle management has transformed my onboarding and offboarding efficiency significantly. Previously, onboarding felt toward a bottleneck, and offboarding raised risk concerns. Before implementing the Okta Platform-driven lifecycle, HR would create a ticket in ServiceNow , and three different teams would manually provision AD, email, and six to eight SaaS apps, which typically took around one to two business days, during which errors frequently occurred, including wrong groups and missed deprovisioning, resulting in no clean audit trail.

Offboarding was even worse, with terminations after hours sitting until the next day, creating 12 to 24-hour orphaned account windows across key apps. The task was to automate the entire JML process end-to-end. After integrating Okta Platform and linking HR to serve as Okta Platform UD, mapping everything, and designing attribute-driven access with SCIM provisioning while implementing movers logic, the results were remarkable. The time-to-access dropped from one to two days down to two to four hours for SCIM provisioning, improving day-one readiness from 78 to 96% for new hires. Manual provisioning tasks fell by 55%, allowing the IAM  team to reclaim 10 to 12 hours per week to focus on governance and SOD areas.

This transformation allowed HR hires in Workday to auto-create the Okta Platform user, with Universal Directory attributes driving the assignment seamlessly.

My impression of the automated threat response feature in Okta Platform AI is that it brings net positive results concerning both speed and containment when tuned appropriately. It shortens the time from suspicious signals to protective actions, practically reducing risk without overwhelming the SOC with noise.

We have seen a return on investment with clear metrics that demonstrate both hard savings and reduced risk.

Pricing for Okta Platform has proven to be straightforward, with no challenges encountered. As a fully SaaS solution, everything is pre-built and managed by Okta Platform. The costs come down to paying for subscriptions, professional services, and ongoing operations, specifically licensing workforce identity with SSO and adaptive MFA for all employees, along with add-ons towards Lifecycle Management for JML automation at scale, Advanced Server Access for Linux and Windows servers, and IGA  for access certification indicating SOD. The pricing per-user list drops when user counts rise and with multi-year commitments.

In evaluating options prior to choosing Okta Platform, we ran a structured assessment comparing various solutions such as ADFS, Duo plus manual JML, and also considered alternatives including Microsoft Entra ID  and Ping Identity.

My advice for teams considering Okta Platform is to start with clear objectives and metrics, defining what success looks like to ensure effective implementation. I am providing this review with an overall rating of eight.

My use case for Okta Platform  is that we mostly use it for SSO  for the applications we have integrated with Okta. We primarily use SSO  for user authentication, and user management is not particularly involved, but we are importing users from Active Directory to Okta.

I assess the role of Universal Directory as a single source of truth for our user identities by stating that there is an application called Workday , and from Workday  to SailPoint, Okta Platform  will be the target system for SailPoint. When a user joins the organization, aggregation runs from HRMS to SailPoint, which is responsible for creating the birthright application, with AD being one of those. Once the user is created in AD, import jobs will run based on the mapping we did with AD and Okta Platform, and the user will be created in Okta Platform.

The best features of Okta Platform include the import feature, which allows for new employees joining the organization to have their AD account created, and when this import runs from AD to Okta Platform, this employee will be created in Okta Platform. This feature represents automation between Okta Platform and AD.

Apart from these features, I appreciate that there are password policies and authentication policies or network zones we can configure in Okta Platform. If we want to restrict the users from logging in from specific network zones or blacklisted ones, we can configure those.

The context-aware policies of adaptive MFA influence my authentication process because we can enable more MFA based on client requirements. Okta Platform is one of the MFA tools available, alongside others such as RSA, and based on the requirements, we can enable those and apply the policy accordingly.

The positive impact I have seen from using Okta Platform is that it makes it easier for new joiners to get birthright access and have users added based on department or employee type. We implement rules and policies, such as when a user joins the sales department; we can configure the group rule, and the user will automatically be tagged to that specific group. This represents an automated process with Okta Platform, rather than doing it manually.

The automated lifecycle management helps with the efficiency of onboarding and offboarding by ensuring that once a user joins the organization, they come into HRMS. From there, it goes to AD, and the target will be Okta Platform. Birthright access and applications are provisioned based on conditions. For offboarding, if an event is triggered, such as leaver or termination, values will be populated in AD, and once the import runs, Okta Platform will terminate the user, disabling access and removing whatever accesses the user had.

In Okta Platform, I do not see much room for improvement because currently, they are managing automations and the new workflow, which helps with automation. Previously, this was not available in Okta Platform, but it was introduced recently.

The automation aspect can be improved.

I have been using Okta Platform for three and a half years.

The stability of Okta Platform, I would say, is an eight because it is growing day by day. Previously, it had static features without automation, but currently, it is moving towards automation and introduced workflows.

I would consider the scalability of Okta Platform to be a six.

The scalability rating of six is due to factors that come with the tenant and the specific elements around that, which I am not entirely sure about.

My relationship with the vendor is as a customer and partner. When we have issues with Okta Platform, we reach out to their support team, and they take care of the issues we encounter.

We do not go through AWS , GCP, or Azure  for Okta Platform; instead, we usually access the Okta Platform support portal to raise our concerns, and the team reaches out to us to resolve those issues, sometimes scheduling meetings as needed.

Before using Okta Platform, I did not really use any other software, but I did consider Entra ID, which is most probably similar to Okta Platform. However, Okta Platform has a user-friendly interface and is easy to use.

The integration aspects include that the capabilities come with modern protocols, making it easier for integration with various protocols and target systems.

Integration capabilities of Okta Platform enable faster deployment, as they support modern protocols such as IDP  and SSO.

I have not used Okta Platform AI, but I need to check on its automated threat response features.

Regarding pricing for Okta Platform, I am not aware of how much it costs because I used to work as a consultant for them, and the licensing details are taken care of by the sales team or others.

The solution requires little maintenance, and I would say it is easier to maintain compared to other IM  platforms such as SailPoint, which had huge coding and infrastructure costs.

My advice to others looking to implement Okta Platform is to definitely go for the software instead of Entra ID, as it offers a much easier and user-friendly UI.

We had a bunch of Active Directory servers, Windows Active Directory servers on-premises. We did an Okta Platform  agent installation on those servers to synchronize the identities from Active Directory to Okta Platform . We then leveraged that integration and configured it as an Identity and Access Management  and SSO  solution.

I used Okta Platform as Identity and Access Management , which served as the source of truth for every single application entitlement and role-based access. Role-based access was a particularly important feature. Multi-Factor Authentication was essential, and I am using and consuming a lot of those even today for a couple of applications, though I am not managing that particular Okta Platform instance as it is managed by a third party. Identity and Access Management, Multi-Factor Authentication, role-based access, and SSO  were all critical components, serving as the source of truth for the entire application footprint. I also used Okta Platform for Zero Trust Network Access  on the consumer side, which was a Palo Alto engine that I integrated with Okta Platform.

Okta Platform is a SaaS service, not something which you have to host yourself on-premises. Of course, you need agents to synchronize if you are already moving from a traditional on-premises identity-based architecture. Okta Platform is SaaS-based. While there are competitors such as Ping Identity, which used to be a great one but has since been acquired, and Microsoft Entra, which does all of it as well, Okta Platform has a lot of advantages. Okta Platform has very rich integration capabilities with a lot of other vendors, including deep integration capabilities with Zscaler, CrowdStrike, most of the ZTNA  vendors, and CASB  vendors. The number of applications that you can natively integrate with it out of the box is quite huge. Another advantage is the risk-based authentication capability, where Okta Platform gives you the capability to have step-up authentication based upon superhuman activity or unusual login detections. MFA is fairly seamless, and while it is not something that Okta Platform is doing alone as others are doing it as well, Okta Platform is stable with no issues with downtime or maintenance. I never had any challenges with that. The rich integrations are a significant advantage.

Context-awareness is more about not just the username or service principals, but also depends upon where and how that particular user is accessing things from. If a particular user changes the endpoint from which they are trying to log in or changes location quite abruptly within a span of few minutes, which is superhuman activity, then that additional context gets captured. You get a true risk-based authentication wherein you have to satisfy more authentication parameters or factors before you can actually get access to the resource.

At the same time, you can also do a lot of conditional access things where if there is a certain level of risk associated with that particular authenticated session, then you can actually restrict the level of access that that particular user can have so that you do not penalize the user just because some session is potentially risky. You can let the user have the ability to do at least the basic work or remediate things. Okta Platform is a full-blown Identity and Access Management solution, so it does send out attributes which can be passed from the identity to the service principle, which is your application. Depending upon that, you can let the application know that this particular user, because it is risky, is not going to be able to access the usual things, but maybe restrict the access. This is completely based upon the context of that particular user's authentication session.

Okta Platform does what it promises that it does. It is certainly all cloud-based as a SaaS solution. For enterprises which really prefer to have their own identity within their own perimeter, Okta Platform might not be the solution they might look for. Of course, there are ways you can get your dedicated tenant, especially for governments and federal agencies and all of those things. I have not tried those use cases. I think Okta Platform is the best of the class and appears consistently at the top of the Gartner report and other research.

Based on the use cases I had, I was fairly happy with it. The PAM capabilities and attribute-based access controls, ABAC, represent a new paradigm. How practical that is for enterprises to deploy largely depends upon the use cases. There is always room for improvement, and it is not just for Okta Platform but typically for every single customer identity provider. There are a lot of other things the biometric and FIDO and all of those which can certainly be improved. However, that is more of a technological constraint rather than the vendor itself.

I have experience working on Okta Platform Identity and Access Management and Secure Server Access. The earliest I remember was back in 2019.

Okta Platform is stable with no issues with downtime or maintenance. I never had any challenges with stability.

Scalability is handled because Okta Platform is a SaaS solution, so it is infinitely scalable. I have account managers that get assigned to the account who make sure that the underlying infrastructure is there to support the need for a lot of user identities that will be getting deployed. I never had any outages. I would rate it like eight or nine.

Support is great. You get in-line support by just logging into it. I never faced a lot of challenges. There were one or two instances where the MFA was a bit slow, but they took care of it very quickly.

The earliest I remember was back in 2019 when I first worked on Okta Platform doing integrations with Zscaler Private Access and Zscaler Internet Access . We had a bunch of Active Directory servers, Windows Active Directory servers on-premises, and we did an Okta Platform agent installation on those servers to synchronize the identities from Active Directory to Okta Platform. I then leveraged that integration and configured it as an Identity and Access Management and SSO solution.

Right now I am not using Okta Platform. I am currently using Entra ID, but I was a customer of Okta Platform until six or seven months ago.

The initial setup is really straightforward. You get a tenant and you get in-line help. The documentation is very feature-rich. It is really straightforward. It takes time depending upon the number of identity providers that you need to integrate with, especially if you are doing a brownfield deployment. For a greenfield deployment, you just get a tenant assigned and start configuring it. It does not take a lot of time.

I have not been asked about implementation teams. I am not even sure if that is a standard practice because Okta Platform sits in its own tenant and I do not think there is anything there.

The reason why I purchased Okta Platform was primarily to centralize Identity and Access Management because it was all scattered. From the identity and access governance standpoint, it made sense to not rely on scattered identity providers but to actually have a single centralized IDP . The ROI comes not from Okta Platform itself, of course, the platform enables it, but the thought process that goes into having all of the identities stored in one single tool, which eases a lot of your entitlements. You do not have to go into different places and give people entitlements. The identity and access governance timeline shortens drastically. Okta Platform has its own IAG as well, which is in-built. If you are a small or mid-sized company, you do not need to have a dedicated IAG and all of those things. Okta Platform can work alone. You can eliminate a lot of inconsistencies and sprawls with your existing tool stack if you move into this. Of course, it is true for Entra ID as well, but with Okta Platform, I think it is one solution that can take care of most of your identity and access related needs.

You get a real value for your money. Whatever amount you spend, you get a bang for it. Okta Platform is decently priced. It is certainly not cheap, but the features that you get, the functionality that you get, and whatever use cases that you have, it definitely satisfies those. There are no hidden things there. Once you have deployed it, they do not ask you for buying other things for integration or just to take care of your use cases. I think they are selling whatever is worth it if you are putting it in.

The primary competitors I would think are Azure  Entra ID. Azure  Entra ID is one of the closest competitors. Both cater to different use cases. Based upon the use cases that I had, there were not a lot where one could do and the other could not. Both are in the same realm.

Based on the use cases I had, I was fairly happy with it. The IAG, Identity and Access Governance , is one of the best features. You can use that for taking care of a lot of your entitlements. If there are people who are getting onboarded, such as bulk users getting onboarded which is true for most of the IT services industries where there are hundreds of people joining every week, and people getting offboarded, those automated lifecycle policies automate the entire thing. It not just removes or suspends your identities, but it also conveys it to the downstream applications. It is one of the best things that they introduced a couple of years ago. I would give Okta Platform an overall rating of nine out of ten.

It is for Single Sign-on and Multi-Factor Authentication.

It is very easy to log in to all my various corporate accounts through Okta Platform . This helps me because I do not need to have any password. I just simply log into Okta Platform  which has a single sign-on capability.

This helps us whenever our employees, our new employees come into the company. On first login, when they come into the company, they have access to all our corporate accounts already once they have their corporate account. They can log into their various productivity and corporate applications. This helps ease the burden from our IT support team to have to onboard someone manually. When someone leaves the company, having an IT team have to remove their access one by one is a very difficult process. Okta Platform Lifecycle Management helps us offboard those employees who have left the company more easily.

It would be great if there were a way to save even my social media passwords and other passwords through Okta Platform and single sign-on through Okta Platform in the future. I do not think they have this capability just yet.

I have been using this for six years.

There were some alternatives like JumpCloud  and Ping Identity that we were evaluating. However, since we are a partner, we prefer Okta Platform. There is a bias towards Okta Platform.

I would say the setup difficulty was in the middle, depending on circumstances. For us, it was quite simple because we had everything in place. We just needed to integrate the Single Sign-on and the directory with our Google Workspace  or our current IDP . It was pretty straightforward and took a couple of days.

Regarding pricing, as mentioned, we are a partner, so we do get a special big discount as a partner versus other customers.

There were some alternatives like JumpCloud  and Ping Identity that we were evaluating.

Okta Platform is a great product and one of the best. We are a partner and have been using it for six years. We have four engineers on our team. We do not use the PAM and do not need it. I would rate this product nine out of ten.