Book Image

Okta Administration Up and Running - Second Edition

By : HenkJan de Vries, Lovisa Stenbäcken Stjernlöf
Book Image

Okta Administration Up and Running - Second Edition

By: HenkJan de Vries, Lovisa Stenbäcken Stjernlöf

Overview of this book

Identity and access management (IAM) is a set of policies and technologies used to ensure an organization’s security, by carefully assigning roles and access to users and devices. This book will get you up and running with Okta, an IAM service that can help you manage both employees and customers. The book begins by helping you understand how Okta can be used as an IAM platform, before teaching you about Universal Directory and how to integrate with other directories and apps, as well as set up groups and policies for Joiner, Mover, and Leaver flows. This updated edition helps you to explore agentless desktop single sign-on (SSO) and multifactor authentication (MFA) solutions, and showing how to utilize Okta to meet NIST requirements. The chapters also walk you through Okta Workflows, low-/no-code automation functionalities, and custom API possibilities used to improve lifecycle management. Finally, you’ll delve into API access auditing and management, where you’ll discover how to leverage Advanced Server Access (ASA) for your cloud servers. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to implement Okta to enhance your organization's security and be able to use the book as a reference guide for the Okta certification exam.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Part 1:Getting Started with Okta
8
Part 2: Extending Okta

API access administration

So, let’s go into the Okta administrator panel to set up some of the features that we examined in the previous section. Navigate to Security | API. Here, we can see that we have three tabs we can work with:

  • Authentication Servers
  • Tokens
  • Trusted Origins

This is what it looks like in the admin panel:

Figure 8.3 – Available tabs for API management

Figure 8.3 – Available tabs for API management

Since we discussed Tokens and Trusted Origins earlier in this chapter, we will now only focus on Authorization Servers. If you don’t have the API Access Management product enabled, you will only see this menu for the default org authorization server, as explained next.

Authorization server

Let’s begin by understanding the purpose of an authorization server. An authorization server is essentially a tool that generates and validates OAuth 2.0 or OIDC tokens. It serves various roles, such as providing authentication for OIDC applications...