Okta Drives Global Expansion and Cuts Development Time from Months to Weeks with MongoDB Atlas on AWS

More than 15,000 global customers depend on Okta to authenticate, authorize, and secure access for critical business applications, devices, and users. Through Okta Customer Identity Cloud, an Identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) solution available as a public or private cloud offering, Okta helps its customers remove the complexity of authentication and authorization for application developers. Every month, Okta processes more than 5 billion authentication requests.

Okta’s Customer Identity Cloud relies heavily on MongoDB, a highly-integrated, open source database management system and AWS Partner. Previously, Okta used self-managed MongoDB Community instances to manage more than 100 database environments. However, this method became challenging as Okta acquired more enterprise customers and its developers spent time managing instances and struggling to roll out new features to the new customers in a timely manner. “With the self-hosted model, we had a lot of manual processes involved with scaling and development,” says Andrew Yu, vice president of engineering at Okta. “Specifically, our private cloud customers were getting very infrequent software updates because the backend environment needed so much manual work to get changes deployed and rolled out. We were growing fast globally, so we wanted to accelerate time to market to support that.”

As it searched for a fully managed platform, Okta also decided to offer Customer Identity Cloud through a converged architecture. With this model, Okta can deploy and manage public and private cloud offerings as a single solution instead of via two different platforms. “Having two separate platforms was not efficient in terms of scalability and innovation,” Yu says. “Our new converged solution for Customer Identity Cloud provides more automation and standardized tools so customers can work faster at a lower cost.”

To support the new converged version of Customer Identity Cloud, Okta chose to migrate the solution to MongoDB Atlas, a fully managed developer data platform that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Using MongoDB Atlas, we can take advantage of the full power of the MongoDB support infrastructure and gain access to the tooling we need to automate and simplify the management of MongoDB at scale,” says Dennis Henry, director of engineering at Okta.

MongoDB is an active partner in the AWS ISV Workload Migration Program, where they are committed to streamlining the migration process for customers migrating self-managed workloads to the cloud. MongoDB worked with Okta to move Customer Identity Cloud to MongoDB Atlas, simplifying a complicated process. “MongoDB made the migration painless because of the great collaboration we had with their team,” Henry says. “Because we moved from a self-hosted model to Atlas on AWS, there were a large number of tenants and environments, and it was a complex undertaking. MongoDB made it easy.”

Okta can offer solutions for their growing customer base more easily by using MongoDB Atlas on AWS as the foundational engine for Customer Identity Cloud. “AWS is highly scalable as a technology, and MongoDB Atlas on AWS makes it easy for us to deploy and manage Customer Identity Cloud at scale whenever we need to,” Henry says. “It’s been a large factor in our ability to continue to grow as a company. For example, we are offering several new tiers for our largest enterprise customers, and we’re able to do that because of Atlas and AWS.”

Additionally, Okta can more easily expand geographically by running on AWS. “We’re offering our solution in 22 AWS Regions, and it’s very simple for us to add new regions as we grow,” Yu says. “We are very excited about expansion in the Middle East and Asia.”

By running Customer Identity Cloud on MongoDB Atlas on AWS, Okta no longer spends hours manually upgrading databases. Instead, the company’s developers can accelerate time to market for new application features and enhancements. “Our customers want new features and improvements, and they want them as fast as possible,” says Henry. “We’ve always been able to turn things around quickly on AWS, but it’s more challenging on our private cloud. Because we’ve consolidated those solutions on MongoDB Atlas on AWS, we’ve reduced time to market for new features, bug fixes, and security updates from months to weeks.”

As an example, Okta recently introduced Security Center, a new Customer Identity Cloud feature that helps customers optimize identity security through a single view of authentication events and potential security incidents. Using this feature, Okta end users can see potential attack trends and threat behavior trends and identify applications associated with these trends. By more accurately monitoring threats and traffic, users can respond to security threats in real time.

Okta has also increased application resiliency by using MongoDB Atlas on AWS. “The tooling and oversight MongoDB offers through performance monitoring within the Atlas user interface allows us to catch any potential issues before they become critical,” says Henry. “Also, MongoDB does a lot of proactive maintenance work to ensure the stability and reliability of the platform.”

Okta is now poised to support ongoing expansion plans by using MongoDB Atlas on AWS. “We have ambitious plans to scale and expand into new regions,” says Yu. “We look forward to collaborating with MongoDB and AWS to make that happen.”