In order for your enterprise business to function, it’s imperative that your team utilizes several SaaS platforms, tools, and apps. There’s so much that needs to happen in the background in order to ensure that you deliver high-quality products and services to your customers.
Take an ecommerce business, for example. For their team, this means selecting an appropriate platform, like Shopify, through which they can sell their products. Let’s also remember payment gateways and shipping carriers. And what about a CRM, analytics tool, and email marketing platforms? These are just a few of the essentials; we could go on but we’d be here all day.
For every platform, tool, or app you use, there’s a password that gets added to a growing mountain of credentials. As that number grows, so does the necessity of ensuring your organization’s security at the corporate level.
But what if this doesn’t have to be an issue? What if there was a tool out there that would allow you and all your team members to easily log into all platforms with one master password?
This is where Okta SSO comes into the picture.
What is Okta SSO?
Simply put, Okta enables businesses to provide Single Sign-On (SSO) access to cloud, on-premise, and mobile applications to anyone who needs it. With this service, everyone on your team can sign into Okta and launch any of your business’ web apps without having to re-enter their credentials.
Furthermore, Okta establishes a secure connection with a user's browser or mobile phone and then authenticates the user to Okta-managed apps using one of two SSO integration methods:
Having implemented Okta SSO integrations before, we love how it can bring massive benefits to all kinds of online businesses. In fact, part of our project with Live Nation–a multibillion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees and strict enterprise IT security– was integrating Okta SSO to their Shopify Plus platform for the benefit of their 44,000+ workforce.
What are the benefits of an Okta SSO integration?
So how exactly can integrating Okta SSO improve your business?
Streamlined access to tools and apps, and as a result, increase productivity
Any typical organization has 10-20 different platforms and apps that employees need to use. How many does your business have? Okta SSO removes the time and frustration associated with re-entering credentials for every platform by centralizing and streamlining the entire process. By using a tool like this, everyone can focus their energy toward more productive activities.
Enhanced security across the entire organization
Without a robust SSO tool, you put your organization’s security at risk by openly sharing passwords among your team. And the bigger the company, the riskier it is. With Okta SSO, you can maintain security across the entire organization by having control over staff security and workforce identity.
For example, the IT department can have control over who has access to what, such as when employees are let go or fired, or when someone new gets hired. They can also track who’s been using which platforms or apps, allowing them to ensure their proper use by the right team members.
Extensibility for rapidly growing businesses
Okta provides access to cloud apps with the Okta Integration Network (OIN), a collection of thousands of supported applications. The applications in the OIN can use SWA, SAML, OpenID Connect (OIDC), or proprietary APIs. SSO protocols and provisioning APIs are maintained by Okta.
Rely on the experts for Okta SSO integration
Integrating Okta SSO for custom enterprise needs can require specific knowledge and experience in both SaaS authentication and corporate IT security, to implement properly. Oftentimes, businesses lack the specific platform knowledge that would allow them to easily and seamlessly integrate SSO workflow outside of plug-and-play integrations. By teaming up with experienced integration experts, you can focus on other aspects of your business and have peace of mind knowing that your employees, contractors, and partners are protected.
