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

Using Single Sign-On with Okta

While we will talk a lot about logging into different types of applications and their security steps, Okta, of course, has its own sign-in options. This is, in general, the cornerstone of every end user's experience. Their sign-on to Okta allows no further password inputs in any application beyond Okta. This first encounter with Okta's SSO ensures that the user has identified themselves according to the setup policies and are now allowed to sign into any integrated applications down the road.

The login process for Okta is straightforward and doesn't ask for any high-level understanding of the process. Signing in is as simple as any other application, but on the backend, you will see that Okta allows for a much more granular methodology, making sure all sign-ins are checked against any policy that has been set up.

Every Okta org is created with an Okta.com subdomain. These subdomains are determined at the moment the contract is signed...