Top 7 Okta Tips for Business

Need a simple sign up page for your business? Or even a user management solution to go alongside it? Okta is a reliable and flexible tool that will fit the needs of any business.

Okta authentication for cloud software has made user management more secure and efficient than ever before. With this in mind, you’ll want to make the most of it for your business.

From provisioning new passwords to controlling access with multi-factor authentication, there are lots of ways to take advantage of Okta’s Identity as a Service platform. This article will provide tips on how to make the best of Okta for your business.

1 – Make Temporary Passwords Last

Okta’s “one time passwords” can create temporary logins while you wait for staff members to verify their emails. Once staff members have verified their emails, they’ll get access to normal, long-term passwords. If your staff members don’t need to use Okta very often, we recommend changing their passwords regularly. Doing so will reduce the chances of attackers using stolen usernames and passwords to get into your account.

2 – Use Mobile Authentication for Your Business Apps

If you want your employees and business partners to access specific apps (like Dropbox or Office 365), you can enable “authentication” in the Okta dashboard. Enable authentication for a popular app, and then your employees will be asked to approve a notification on their mobile device before opening that app. If a user works from a public location (like a coffee shop) and doesn’t have their mobile device with them, they can use a one time code that Okta will send them via SMS.

3 – Find out Who is Soliciting Your Users on Social Media with Social Directory

Social media has been an important factor in the growth of your business, but it’s also made it easier for outsiders to connect with your employees. With no security measures in place, your employees could receive messages and friend requests from people who don’t work for your business.

With Okta Social Directory, you can create a directory of colleagues using information pulled from Active Directory. When an outsider tries to connect with one of your employees on Facebook or LinkedIn, that employee will always receive a warning that the connection is coming from a third party and can decide whether to accept the invitation.

4 – Filter out “Bad Eggs”

When you’re growing your business, it’s easy for your address book to get cluttered up with lots of contacts that may not end up being precious. However, those contacts could still cause problems if one of them becomes a bad egg.

With Okta’s Two-Factor Authentication, you can decide who gets access to your crucial information based on factors that are partly out of their control. For example, if an employee gets fired, cut off from the network or just quits for some other reason, they’d lose access to your files automatically so you don’t have to worry about the potential leak.

5 – Stay Secure with Limited Access

Using Okta’s Two-Factor Authentication policies, you can also limit which devices may access different apps. For instance, if your least trusted employees are working on a client file that contains highly sensitive information, you could revoke their access to Dropbox, so they wouldn’t save it onto an unsecured device.

6 – Operations-as-Code

Another Okta best practice is to automate your security processes with code. You can use Okta’s API key and shared secret to create a simple automation script that will help you manage access across all of your apps and seamlessly integrate it into operations.

7 – Prevent Data Tampering

Using the activity monitoring functionality in Okta, you can watch over all user activity within your Okta tenant, including the apps they are accessing. By creating rules to set alerts on anomalous behavior, you can get notified of suspicious changes made to an object in one of the apps. For instance, if someone is trying to delete a critical file that belongs to another department or if they’re trying to change the login credentials of a critical admin account for your cloud application. Then you can take corrective action and block them if they don’t have permission to do so.

Conclusion

By using the activity monitoring functionality in Okta, you can be notified of suspicious changes made to apps. You can then take corrective action to ensure your security.