Security

Review: Okta Grants Access to Necessary Apps with One Password

This powerful security tool helps minimize downtime in the classroom.

Carlos Soto is an award-winning reviewer and journalist with 20 years of experience covering technology and business within various sectors and industries.

There’s a common misconception that increased security often comes at the expense of productivity. This can seem especially true in higher education, where students can easily forget passwords for multiple applications, bringing learning to a halt and turning faculty into help desk technicians.

While this may have been true in the past, Okta’s single sign-on software solution shatters the notion. Okta provides a major boost to security while making things easier for users, and because it’s deployed as a service, administrators have little maintenance to do after the initial setup.

The Okta Identity Cloud can integrate with nearly every major web-based or mobile education application. Once deployed, it delivers complete identity and access management (IAM) that can act as the core of even advanced security methods, such as zero trust. By grouping access to all of a user’s applications under one security umbrella, only one password or authentication method is needed. Users log in to the Okta Identity Cloud, then the application provides access to everything else they need to do their jobs.

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Okta Single Sign-On Empowers IT Teams with Flexibility and Scale

Most important, this full-featured federation engine and flexible access policy is reliable. With colleges and universities at constant risk of hacking and social engineering attacks, Okta single sign-on empowers IT teams with the flexibility and scale of an IAM solution combined with the reliability of cloud and mobile platforms.

This single view of all applications makes Okta a dream for IT security and HR. It’s easy to add new programs to the list of managed ones without adding new passwords. For example, when pushing out a new professional development module or undergoing benefit elections, HR can leverage the Okta Identity Cloud to facilitate access to materials for whoever needs it — and those who don’t need access may not even know that the new resources exist, which provides yet another layer of security.

Students and Faculty Can Access Applications from Multiple Locations

One key benefit of the Okta Identity Cloud, front and center in the latest offering, is the ability to switch to new devices while retaining access to important applications and files. If a faculty member is working on a desktop and needs to transfer to a laptop or tablet to head home for the night, the process is seamless, with no worries about file access or additional passwords.

Unlike legacy federation and access management systems, Okta single sign-on is lightweight and easy to deploy. Because there is only one login, IT security has less to keep track of as far as password management goes. Okta can also scale to meet the demands of any college or university, while securely connecting staff, faculty and students to all of their cloud and on-premises applications, across all of their devices.

Specifications

Software type: Multifactor authentication
Aggregator: Works with online and appliance-based services
Form: Single sign-on authentication tool
Installation: Software as a Service
License type: Subscription, with discounts for large deployments

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Okta Can Help HR Simplify Onboarding and Offboarding

Onboarding and offboarding employees can be challenging for higher education institutions, even though both are critical. If new employees are not onboarded in a timely way, they are essentially locked out of doing their jobs.

According to recent research by HR consulting firm Brandon Hall Group, organizations with strong onboarding processes can improve new-hire retention by more than 80 percent. On the other end, the longer it takes to remove departing employees from the system, the longer major security holes can exist at an organization.

With more higher education employees leaving the profession, it is essential for schools to engage with them in a manner that drives retention and lets new employees become productive quickly.

Okta can grant access to new employees as part of the hiring process. By the time new teachers and staff first set foot on campus or log in from their remote locations, all of their access rights will have already been sorted out.

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