In today’s cloud-centric world, cyberattacks are a major threat to organizations. Identity and Access Management (IAM) products can help protect against these attacks by offering a single point of control for managing access and enforcing security policies.
In this article, we will explain what Okta is, how it works, and how you can integrate it with your existing infrastructure to secure your organization.
Okta is an Identity and Access Management (IAM) company that offers different identity-based products for modern businesses. IAM and identity products help businesses to protect their applications and data, streamline login experience, and boost productivity.
Okta believes that everything starts with and revolves around identity — a digital representation of an individual in the online world. It encompasses:
In an identity-driven world, any user who wants to access a network resource must first obtain an identity. This identity will contain the privileges they need to access the network resource and perform any authorized actions on it.
For example, a user would need an identity to access resources on a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account. This identity would typically contain a list of resources they can access and operations they can perform.
For instance, their identity policy may allow them to read data from an API exposed by a GCP cloud function. It also allows them to read and write data to a particular cloud database. To perform any other action, or access any other resource, they must request administrators to update the policy associated with their identity.
These characteristics of an identity empower businesses to build secure and seamless login experiences, such as single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and passwordless authentication.
Okta has an always-on architecture that focuses on scalability, reliability, and security. The 100% cloud architecture uses multiple availability zones on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for high availability and fault-tolerance. It also leverages the power of numerous Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to offer a seamless experience to users around the world, even during peak traffic times.
At the heart of the Okta architecture are proprietary building blocks known as cells. Each cell is a standalone instance of the entire Okta service, containing load balancers, app servers, a database, elastic cache, and job servers. New cells can be added to the Okta architecture to scale up for performance, availability, or other needs.
Okta’s cell architecture offers several benefits, including:
Okta offers several features related to security and user experience:
Okta is often compared to other identity providers, such as Duo, One Identity, and SailPoint.Here is a brief comparison of Okta with these three alternatives:
(Note: In the past, Okta was also compared to Auth0, but it's worth noting that Okta acquired Auth0 in 2021, consolidating their positions in the IAM space.)
Okta vs. Duo
Okta vs. One Identity
Okta vs. SailPoint
In a remote-first, cyber-vulnerable world, identity can serve as the new security perimeter. It enables organizations of all sizes and industries to control who can access what, for how long, and under which circumstances.
With that said, here are a few specific scenarios where your organization can benefit from an identity-focused solution like Okta:
Okta works by offering organizations an easy way to authenticate and authorize users across different applications and environments. In the following sections, we will explore various concepts that govern the world of Okta.
Okta offers an OAuth-as-a-service model for API access management, which has several advantages for organizations:
Policies are JSON documents that govern access to applications and APIs. Each policy document contains a set of rules that are evaluated to determine whether to allow or deny a login request. Okta supports different factors to restrict or grant access, including device, time, location, and group membership. For example, you may define a policy that grants all members of a user group access to an AWS Lambda function.
Administrators can use policies to achieve a variety of use cases, such as the following:
Okta supports different types of policies:
Okta creates a default policy for each policy type. This ensures that there is a fallback policy that can be applied to a user, regardless of the situation.
An authorization server supplies the tokens used for OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect workflows. It can also be used to enforce access policies. Okta supports two kinds of authorization servers:
Okta offers a built-in authorization server, known as the org authorization server. It’s not possible to modify the audience, policies, claims, or scopes of this authorization server. Use it to obtain an access token for Okta APIs or perform single sign-on for apps that support OpenID Connect.
Okta provides the following endpoints to retrieve OAuth or OpenID Connect metadata for the default authorization server:
OpenID: https://${organization-name}/.well-known/openid-configuration
OAuth: https://${organization-name}/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server
This authorization server allows you to define and enforce authorization policies for your APIs. Okta users can create multiple authorization servers within a single Okta organization to cater to different API security use cases. Each custom server can have its own scopes, access policies, and claims.
Every Okta organization includes a default custom authorization server that has a standard access policy and a rule. The ID of the default custom server is default, and it can be used as follows:
https://${okta-domain}/api/v1/authorizationServers/default
User-created custom servers are given a unique and random alphanumeric ID. Okta provides the following endpoints to retrieve OAuth or OpenID Connect metadata for a custom authorization server:
OpenID: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/${authorizationServerId}/.well-known/openid-configuration
OAuth: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/${authorizationServerId}/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server
To get the same for the default custom server, use these endpoints:
OpenID: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/default/.well-known/openid-configuration
OAuth: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/default/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server
Okta brands enable organizations to tweak the design of different Okta pages and templates, including the login page, loading page, error pages, and end user dashboard. Organizations can change the logo, colors, background images, display language, and fonts used in Okta.
Okta offers multi-brand customization, which allows users to create and manage multiple brands within the same organization. This makes it significantly easier to set up multi-tenant architectures. Users can define multiple custom domains and bind each domain with a unique version of the login page, error pages, and end user dashboard.
Okta also provides public APIs to programmatically manage branding, including APIs for creating a brand, retrieving customized error pages, replacing customized error pages, and listing all email customizations.
Event hooks are asynchronous HTTPS REST calls to external URLs that are triggered based on events in an Okta organization. The request body of an event hook may contain JSON objects that describe the event.
Okta supports different types of events. For example, users can report events when:
Event hooks are a great way to notify a target system of important events, automate event-driven tasks, or gather data for analytics.
Okta can connect seamlessly to external identity providers. In such an architecture, Okta acts as the user store sitting between the application and the external identity provider(s). The application only needs to connect to Okta, while Okta manages the connections to the external provider(s).
This approach has several benefits, including the following:
Here’s how the external identity verification works:
To get started with Okta, you need to sign up on the official website and choose a plan that best meets your needs. Once you have registered and logged in successfully, you can follow these five steps to configure a new Okta organization:
Okta provides application clients and starter kits for multiple languages and frameworks, including PHP, Node.js, Java Spring Boot, JavaScript, React, and Angular. It also provides detailed guides on all the steps you need to take to get started, such as user management, directory integration, app integrations, browser plugins, sign-on policies, MFA, risk-based authentication, and threat analytics.
Okta is a cloud-based identity provider with a diverse feature set. To manage and monitor your Okta logs effectively, please check out our open source plugin from Site24x7. You can also use Okta to implement adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA), perform identity governance, enable single sign-on (SSO) for all your applications, or enforce passwordless authentication that’s compliant with OAuth standards.
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