Book Image

Okta Administration: Up and Running

By : Lovisa Stenbäcken Stjernlöf, HenkJan de Vries
Book Image

Okta Administration: Up and Running

By: Lovisa Stenbäcken Stjernlöf, HenkJan de Vries

Overview of this book

IAM, short for identity and access management, is a set of policies and technologies for ensuring the security of an organization through careful role and access assignment for users and devices. With this book, you’ll get up and running with Okta, an identity and access management (IAM) service that you can use for both employees and customers. Once you’ve understood how Okta can be used as an IAM platform, you’ll learn about the Universal Directory, which covers how to integrate other directories and applications and set up groups and policies. As you make progress, the book explores Okta’s single sign-on (SSO) feature and multifactor authentication (MFA) solutions. Finally, you will delve into API access management and discover how you can leverage Advanced Server Access for your cloud servers and Okta Access Gateway for your on-premises applications. By the end of this Okta book, you’ll have learned how to implement Okta to enhance your organization's security and be able to use this book as a reference guide for the Okta certification exam.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Okta
8
Section 2: Extending Okta

Directory integrations

If your organization is fairly new, there is a big chance that it was born in the cloud. Probably, you're only using cloud services and your user directory is 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. Many organizations like this are not ready to leave their Active Directory (AD)/ Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) behind. Not to 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 explained earlier, this becomes a problem when companies are moving toward cloud applications. Many cloud applications have their own directory...