Insights from Oktane 2024: What We Learned

This October, Okta hosted another productive and informative event with their annual Oktane conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. MightyID was a proud sponsor as thousands of Okta customers and Identity Access Management (IAM) specialists came together for this much-anticipated thought leadership event.  

Attendees were wowed by the new capabilities Okta is developing, and its work in creating new standards like IPSIE. Each session provided new insights into the future of Identity Access Management solutions, and Okta’s commitment to leading the way with more best-of-breed features.  

Beyond the Oktane agenda and conference sessions, the MightyID resilience experts kept their ears open to the conversations between peers and customers, who revealed up-and-coming trends and common concerns regarding IAM systems or access management IAM. Here are some of the top insights and trends that we identified from Oktane 2024.  

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The Importance of Change Management

With a tool as mission critical as Okta, you can never have enough visibility. Change management – especially in relation to audit reporting – has become an increasingly top-of-mind requirement for many IAM professionals focused on managing user identities and maintaining levels of access within organizations.  

“Auditors are asking for more information about what is going on within my Okta environment,” said one attendee.  

Beyond the auditing use case, the practical ability to view, investigate, and revert suspicious changes is also an important feature to Okta customers. This feature plays a key role in reducing risk by ensuring any unauthorized access or changes are quickly detected and managed.

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Strategic Value of Workflows

More and more Okta customers are utilizing Workflows to automate identity-centric processes without the need for custom development. The use of Workflows is allowing IAM owners to be more efficient and effective in their identity management.  

As IAM practitioners are relying on Workflows to elevate their Okta systems, the question of backup and recovery arises. Luckily, backups of Okta Workflows are now possible, and many Oktane attendees were eager to learn more.  

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Struggles with Production and Preview Environments

One of the most common pain-points we heard from Okta practitioners is the complication around syncing preview and production tenants. For many, the process of duplicating preview changes to the production environment is a manual one. And as with any manual process, errors are likely to occur. This is a persistent issue in IAM solutions that seek to manage both production and preview environments seamlessly.

“We almost always encounter problems with testing and production servers. The fact is they always seem to be configured differently,” said one attendee. “The frustrating part is that this happens all the time and no one seems to know what to do about it.”

Of course, we have a general idea as to why this might happen. Although every cloned environment starts the same, it can be very difficult to maintain the carbon-copy similarities that are necessary for proper functioning. And as time goes by, the discrepancies compound.

Luckily, MightyID’s continuous migration feature allows for an automated sync between production and preview environments. In fact, MightyID was originally created for this specific use case: as a tool to continuously sync a staging and production tenant, ensuring identities and configurations are consistently mirrored to reduce security risks and human error while improving efficiency.  

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Minimizing Distractions to Get More Value Out of Okta

More than anything, Oktane attendees were excited to learn about new ways to extract more value from their Okta instances without concerns to revert changes that aren’t successful. Part of that ability comes from freeing time for their IAM practitioners that could be working on more valuable ways to optimize their Okta instance.  

“We spend a lot of time doing manual backups of our entire Okta instance, and saving copies in drive, scripts, and third-party databases,” said one attendee. “Those large backups can be unwieldy and don’t always help in the event of a minor issue.”

At the end of the day, Okta is an extremely powerful security tool, helping organizations manage and authenticate users while supporting single sign-on (SSO) features. The practitioners and thought leaders in attendance at Oktane 2024 were all enthusiastic about its features and how it supports a more secure IAM work environment. The attendees highlighted the significance of implementing IAM tools to better manage usernames and passwords and overall security accessing critical systems.  

To learn more about how MightyID can help elevate your Okta environment, reach out to sales@mightyid.com, or schedule a demo.