Making identity easy is our motto: David Bradbury, CSO, Okta

Oktane 2024 started in Las Vegas, USA, today. 

Speaking at the sidelines, David Bradbury, CSO, Okta, said we have over 19,0000 customers that rely on Okta. We are a fundamentally critical infrastructure. We are always on, and always secure. My team of 250+ people is there to secure Okta for our customers.

We are also starting to seed our team in India, We are seeding growth in identity and access management teams. We are seeking to leverage India-based teams for augmenting IDM. We also have people who are independent, and participate in bug bounties. We are seeing consistent names to appear. We are just starting the journey o develop our team in India.

Cloud-native company
The strength of Okta is that we are a cloud-native company. You don't have baggage of on-premise software. We have the level of innovation that has been happening. We have also scaled, and are continuing to grow, and further scale. We are born and engineered in the cloud. 

IDM has actually been around  for a very long time. People have tried solving these for the past 10-15 years. They are expensive to build, and even more expensive to run. However, there is an easier path to do all of that. There is a cloud-first! We will continue to make features that make identity much easier to manage. Making identity easy is our motto. Our customers love this, and keep buying more from us. 

The SMEs are the ones that use Okta the most. You don't need a big IT team to install Okta. We continue to do so, as they go live. The strength of our product is that it is really very easy to try and maintain.

In the financial institutions, we have several challenges. Attackers focus on what works. Phishing continues to work even today. Phishing kits are freely available on places like GitHub, etc. You can easily create addresses, etc. to these phishing kits. AI has also become a challenge. Phishing emails can look so good and compelling today. They have become much more advanced.

So many locks have been put up at the front door. Attackers now try and go after people, rather than technology, and companies. We have to put up large helpdesks. We have employee IDs and managers names. We have to implement stronger authentication.

However, many companies have not yet adopted this. We have secured login pages of thousands of apps. We need to protect all adjacent areas. We can manage patching your systems. We are engineered for that from the beginning. We are accelerating that journey. 

We also have two reports coming up. One, we look at average number of apps adopted. Which of these apps are strong? Microsoft has been very strong in financial. This year, we also saw about 5% of the companies did not use any passwords in 2023-24.

In future, we are going to be password-less, and it is an exciting prospect. The logins are captured in biometrics. Smart cards today are less biometric. You can use smart cards with Okta. You can also use US government login credentials with Okta.

From this conference, we have been working on security. We have prioritized building secure features into our products. We will take the industry to fight against identity-based attacks. Enterprise SaaS companies are also going to raise the bar. We are going to work in partnerships.