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

Contextual access management

Important note

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

With Okta's contextual access, it becomes possible to use linear elements of different technologies to be combined 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 fluid with a multitude of vectors that are accessible and known by Okta during authentication moments.

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