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

Different types of factors

We will start by looking at the different types of factors that are available for working with Okta. These can be divided into three categories:

  • Knowledge factors
  • Possession factors
  • Biometric factors

Let's look at them more closely.

Knowledge factors

Knowledge factors are the ones you need to memorize. First of all is your password, which needs to abide by the password requirements set up in Okta. Secondly, Okta allows a security question to be used as a knowledge factor. This factor is different from the security question used to do self-service resets and unlock features, explained in Chapter 3, Single Sign-On for a Great End User Experience.

By enabling the security question factor for your end users, they will receive a notification saying Extra verification is required for your account after their first sign on. End users are required to follow these steps:

  1. Click the security question factor setup button...