M+E Connections

Okta: More Companies Looking to Become 100% Cloud/Mobile IT Organizations

An increasing number of companies are looking to become “100 percent cloud and mobile IT” organizations, but they face challenges, according to Daniel Lu, Okta product marketing manager.

“We’re really seeing more companies who want to adopt [a] 100 percent cloud and mobile strategy, but they’re not exactly sure what that looks like or how to get there,” he said on an April 5 webinar called “Building 100% Cloud & Mobile IT.”

The companies looking to adopt such a strategy have on-premises resources and “are actively pursuing initiatives such as migrating off” of an Active Directory (AD) or “enabling” a bring-your-own-device environment, he said. Some of the companies “were born in the cloud and grew up with services like Google or Slack, but are beginning to see some challenges staying 100 percent in the cloud as they continue to scale,” he said.

“Today’s modern IT departments are fully adopting cloud — and really for good reason” because 100 percent cloud and mobile IT strategies help them remain competitive, he said, adding: “They scale faster because they can deploy and adopt apps as rapidly as their company can grow, and they can enable a more effective workforce that always has access to apps and data that they need.”

IT departments are also increasingly adopting 100 percent cloud and mobile IT strategies because it decreases costs, he said. That’s because companies will no longer have to invest in resources to manage “on-prem” infrastructures and updating the accompanying firmware and configurations, he said. There are also “fewer help desk calls” because employees will have self-service tools for tasks including password resets when they become 100 percent cloud and mobile IT-based, he explained. Companies will also cut costs because they will only have to pay for capacity they need at any given time, he said.

Shifting to 100 percent cloud and mobile IT strategies also increases security, he said. That’s because resources will always be up to date and “changes are pushed out in real time,” he said.

But “there are definitely some challenges” in achieving a 100 percent cloud and mobile IT strategy that depend on what point a company is starting from, he went on to say.

For “cloud native” companies that were “born in the cloud” and never had any on-prem resources, the “main challenge” faced is scaling, he said. That’s because such companies probably don’t have a good central administrative tool to manage access and security policies, and they’re also relying on manual processes that “don’t scale very well, especially for onboarding and off-boarding users,” he said. In addition, the growing distributed workforce require new security processes and these companies are also dealing with increased collaboration within their growing organizations and with outside partners and contractors that need secure access to the information they need, he said.

For “cloud aggressive” companies that have on-prem apps and are “looking to move everything to the cloud as quickly as possible,” the main challenge is “modernizing their on-prem infrastructure,” he said. These companies need to replace their on-prem directories, need centralized user directories and group and user memberships, and must manage who gets access to what information, he explained.

Lu pointed out that Okta offers services that help companies “build out” to become a “100 percent cloud and mobile IT organization.”