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

Contextual access management

Important note

Some functionalities explained in this chapter – for instance, contextual access, dynamic zones, and behavior detection – are only available with licenses for Adaptive MFA and Adaptive SSO products.

With Okta’s contextual access, it becomes possible to use different technologies and combine them into a more complete picture of the user’s situation and requirements. Instead of assigning roles or groups to corresponding policies, Okta can act much more fluidly with a multitude of security vectors that are accessible and known by Okta during authentication activity.

By allowing this context to be used, Okta decides in a much more fine-grained way what to do and how to allow the user to sign in to Okta or the required application(s). Okta can build a risk assessment based on a stack of vectors, such as location, device posture, type of request, timing, and so on. From this, together with group assignments...