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

Directory integrations

If your organization is fairly new, there is a big chance that it was born in the cloud. You may be only using cloud services and your UD might be in one of your applications, perhaps your collaboration platform. You will probably want to use Okta as your new identity directory going forward. But for other organizations, your users may have been living in a separate directory for ages, and you might have multiple hardware and infrastructure connections to that directory. The most common directory services are Microsoft Active Directory (AD) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), and many organizations like this are not ready to leave them behind. Don’t worry – Okta can integrate with multiple directories and synchronize users, groups, attributes, and passwords.

Previously, this directory setup was sufficient, but with the shift in perimeter that was explained in Chapter 1, this can become a problem when companies are moving toward...