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

Managing inbound SSO

Okta allows the users to use external identity providers to log in to Okta with their own user database and login methods. This can be a Microsoft, Google, or a generic OIDC or SAML application. You could have contractors or outside partners needing access to some of your applications that want their IdP to be the source to log in with. Using inbound SSO with Okta makes it possible to connect with other IdPs and have their users login.

Even though Okta can easily connect to one of the aforementioned methods, we will focus specifically on connecting with an SAML IdP, allowing users to log in and have additional options to use. This is shown in the following IdP list:

Figure 3.19 – An overview of the identity providers configured

Figure 3.19 – An overview of the identity providers configured

When navigating to Security | Identity Providers, you end up on the overview page for all inbound SSO connections.

Clicking on the Add Identity Provider button allows you to choose the type of IdP...