How does Okta work? A complete guide

Table of Contents

In today’s cloud-centric world, cyberattacks are a major threat to organizations. Identity and Access Management (IAM) products can help protect against these attacks by offering a single point of control for managing access and enforcing security policies.

In this article, we will explain what Okta is, how it works, and how you can integrate it with your existing infrastructure to secure your organization.

What is Okta?

Okta is an Identity and Access Management (IAM) company that offers different identity-based products for modern businesses. IAM and identity products help businesses to protect their applications and data, streamline login experience, and boost productivity.

Identity

Okta believes that everything starts with and revolves around identity — a digital representation of an individual in the online world. It encompasses:

  • The different attributes used to identify a user online, such as their username, password, or fingerprint data
  • The permissions and privileges that have been granted to a user, such as whether they can access application X, or perform a WRITE operation on application Y
  • The validity of their credentials, such as how long they can use this username–password combination to access applications

In an identity-driven world, any user who wants to access a network resource must first obtain an identity. This identity will contain the privileges they need to access the network resource and perform any authorized actions on it.

For example, a user would need an identity to access resources on a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account. This identity would typically contain a list of resources they can access and operations they can perform.

For instance, their identity policy may allow them to read data from an API exposed by a GCP cloud function. It also allows them to read and write data to a particular cloud database. To perform any other action, or access any other resource, they must request administrators to update the policy associated with their identity.

These characteristics of an identity empower businesses to build secure and seamless login experiences, such as single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and passwordless authentication.

Okta architecture

Okta has an always-on architecture that focuses on scalability, reliability, and security. The 100% cloud architecture uses multiple availability zones on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for high availability and fault-tolerance. It also leverages the power of numerous Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to offer a seamless experience to users around the world, even during peak traffic times.

At the heart of the Okta architecture are proprietary building blocks known as cells. Each cell is a standalone instance of the entire Okta service, containing load balancers, app servers, a database, elastic cache, and job servers. New cells can be added to the Okta architecture to scale up for performance, availability, or other needs.

Okta’s cell architecture offers several benefits, including:

  • Risk containment: Even if a data center goes down, a cell in a different AWS zone can take over.
  • No vendor lock-in: Okta cells can be deployed on AWS, GCP, or Microsoft Azure.
  • Horizontal and vertical scalability: In addition to adding more cells, Okta can also increase the capacity of a cell by provisioning multiple tenants on it.
  • Incremental deployment and rollback: Okta can deploy or roll back changes to a single cell at a time. This helps to prevent errors from propagating to the entire infrastructure.

Security and User Experience Features of Okta

Okta offers several features related to security and user experience:

  • Block malicious login: Okta’s ThreatInsight allows you to block login requests originating from suspicious IP addresses, including those involved in phishing, credential stuffing, social engineering, and other attacks.
  • Devices: Okta allows users to create and store a mapping between a user and their devices. The Devices API enables authentication across devices, while the Devices SDK simplifies the process of device registration and setting up passwordless, cross-device authentication.
  • Context-based authentication: Okta users can define contextual access policies to streamline access for authorized users and make it harder for potential attackers. These policies allow Okta to calculate a risk score for an authentication request and adjust the login requirements accordingly.
    For example, a device-based policy can affect the authentication experience of a user trying to log in from an unregistered device. This friction can be in the form of requiring multiple factors of authentication, such as a retina scan or a one-time password. Conversely, a user logging in from a registered device from inside the company network may only have to enter their password to log in.
  • Security recommendations: Okta can also perform an audit of an infrastructure in real time to identify any security gaps, misconfigurations, or vulnerabilities. The audit report also includes recommendations to improve the verall security outlook.
  • One-click access for all applications: Okta integrates seamlessly with popular applications like Salesforce, Workday, Office 365, and Zendesk, giving employees one-click access to their favorite apps.
  • Identity federation: Okta supports identity federation out of the box. This makes it easier to authenticate external users and consolidate legacy/on-premise and cloud applications.
  • Lifecycle management: Okta provides administrators with a central dashboard to manage the lifecycle of all identities. They can easily assign time-bound or full-time access to users and automate the onboarding and offboarding processes.

Okta vs. other IAM providers

Okta is often compared to other identity providers, such as Duo, One Identity, and SailPoint.Here is a brief comparison of Okta with these three alternatives:

(Note: In the past, Okta was also compared to Auth0, but it's worth noting that Okta acquired Auth0 in 2021, consolidating their positions in the IAM space.)

Okta vs. Duo

  • Okta offers a more comprehensive set of authentication options, including multi-factor, risk-based, contextual, passwordless, biometric, and external identity provider authentication. Duo focuses more on multi-factor authentication.
  • Both solutions offer adaptive access, SSO, remote access, and device trust.
  • Both solutions offer security analytics and threat prevention, but Okta’s offerings are much more robust and wide-ranging.
  • Okta has a much larger ecosystem of integrations than Duo.

Okta vs. One Identity

  • Both companies offer cloud-based identity solutions for businesses of all sizes.
  • Both support a wide range of features, including lifecycle management, adaptive authentication, identity federation, SSO, and automated provisioning.
  • Okta’s built-in security analytics is much more advanced compared to One Identity.
  • Based on Gartner reviews, One Identity is much easier to deploy than Okta.

Okta vs. SailPoint

  • Both companies offer cloud-based identity solutions for businesses of all sizes.
  • Both offer wide-ranging features, including centralized control, access risk management, identity automation, and identity governance.
  • As per G2 reviews, Okta is much easier to use than SailPoint.
  • As per G2 reviews, Okta is also much easier to set up than SailPoint.

Who should use Okta?

In a remote-first, cyber-vulnerable world, identity can serve as the new security perimeter. It enables organizations of all sizes and industries to control who can access what, for how long, and under which circumstances.

With that said, here are a few specific scenarios where your organization can benefit from an identity-focused solution like Okta:

  • If you are undergoing digital transformation efforts to modernize your cybersecurity.
  • If you've experienced vulnerabilities and cyberattacks in the past.
  • If you want to offer a smoother and more user-friendly login experience.
  • If you belong to industries like Software as a Service (SaaS), healthcare, or finance and need to safeguard customer data.

How does Okta work?

Okta works by offering organizations an easy way to authenticate and authorize users across different applications and environments. In the following sections, we will explore various concepts that govern the world of Okta.

What is API access management?

Okta offers an OAuth-as-a-service model for API access management, which has several advantages for organizations:

  • Centralized control over all APIs increases efficiency and reduces the chances of misconfigurations.
  • Instead of using credentials (usernames and passwords) for authentication, Okta uses short-lived tokens with well-defined scopes. This drastically reduces the overall attack surface of an infrastructure.
  • Okta users can create custom authorization servers for different sets of APIs, products, or customers.
  • Okta users can restrict access to APIs and applications using policies that can contain complicated conditions and rules.
  • Okta allows users to create different scopes and claims. Scopes are used to outline the access privileges that an application requests from a user during authorization. For example, the phone scope requests access to the user’s phone number. Claims are pieces of information about a user that are present within tokens. For example, a claim may specify the identity or name of a user.
  • Okta users can focus on their business rather than worrying about changes in authentication standards. Okta takes care of the updates and ensures that users are always using the latest authentication methods.

What are Okta policies?

Policies are JSON documents that govern access to applications and APIs. Each policy document contains a set of rules that are evaluated to determine whether to allow or deny a login request. Okta supports different factors to restrict or grant access, including device, time, location, and group membership. For example, you may define a policy that grants all members of a user group access to an AWS Lambda function.

Administrators can use policies to achieve a variety of use cases, such as the following:

  • Define fine-grained authorization rules, including the resources a user can access and the operations they can perform on those resources.
  • Enforce additional layers of authentication for sensitive applications, such as configuring multi-factor authentication for accessing a database that contains customer data.
  • Specify a list of authorized users and deny access to everyone else.
  • Fetch user information from an external identity provider to authorize the user.

Okta supports different types of policies:

  • Sign-on policies: These policies define authentication flows using IF/THEN rules. The IF part of a rule specifies the context, whereas the THEN part specifies the login experience. For example, IF a user’s IP address falls within a configured range THEN don’t ask them for a secondary authentication factor.
  • Password policies: These policies are used to govern the strength and complexity of user passwords. They can also be used to control how often users must change their passwords and how to recover lost or forgotten passwords.
  • Enrollment policies: These policies are further divided into authenticator enrollment and profile enrollment policies. Authenticator enrollment policies are used to enroll authenticators and configure methods for MFA. Profile enrollment policies define the attributes used for verifying users during authentication.
  • API access policies: These policies are used to authenticate and authorize client applications with Okta.

Okta creates a default policy for each policy type. This ensures that there is a fallback policy that can be applied to a user, regardless of the situation.

What are authorization servers?

An authorization server supplies the tokens used for OAuth 2.0 or OpenID Connect workflows. It can also be used to enforce access policies. Okta supports two kinds of authorization servers:

Org authorization server

Okta offers a built-in authorization server, known as the org authorization server. It’s not possible to modify the audience, policies, claims, or scopes of this authorization server. Use it to obtain an access token for Okta APIs or perform single sign-on for apps that support OpenID Connect.

Okta provides the following endpoints to retrieve OAuth or OpenID Connect metadata for the default authorization server:

 
OpenID: https://${organization-name}/.well-known/openid-configuration
                  
 
OAuth: https://${organization-name}/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server

Custom authorization server

This authorization server allows you to define and enforce authorization policies for your APIs. Okta users can create multiple authorization servers within a single Okta organization to cater to different API security use cases. Each custom server can have its own scopes, access policies, and claims.

Every Okta organization includes a default custom authorization server that has a standard access policy and a rule. The ID of the default custom server is default, and it can be used as follows:

 
https://${okta-domain}/api/v1/authorizationServers/default

User-created custom servers are given a unique and random alphanumeric ID. Okta provides the following endpoints to retrieve OAuth or OpenID Connect metadata for a custom authorization server:

 
OpenID: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/${authorizationServerId}/.well-known/openid-configuration 
 
OAuth: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/${authorizationServerId}/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server

To get the same for the default custom server, use these endpoints:

 
OpenID: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/default/.well-known/openid-configuration 
 
OAuth: https://${okta-domain}/oauth2/default/.well-known/oauth-authorization-server

What are Okta brands?

Okta brands enable organizations to tweak the design of different Okta pages and templates, including the login page, loading page, error pages, and end user dashboard. Organizations can change the logo, colors, background images, display language, and fonts used in Okta.

Okta offers multi-brand customization, which allows users to create and manage multiple brands within the same organization. This makes it significantly easier to set up multi-tenant architectures. Users can define multiple custom domains and bind each domain with a unique version of the login page, error pages, and end user dashboard.

Okta also provides public APIs to programmatically manage branding, including APIs for creating a brand, retrieving customized error pages, replacing customized error pages, and listing all email customizations.

What are event hooks?

Event hooks are asynchronous HTTPS REST calls to external URLs that are triggered based on events in an Okta organization. The request body of an event hook may contain JSON objects that describe the event.

Okta supports different types of events. For example, users can report events when:

  • An approver denies an access request
  • A Certificate Signing Request (CSR) is revoked
  • An unauthorized user tries to access an application
  • An application signing key is rotated

Event hooks are a great way to notify a target system of important events, automate event-driven tasks, or gather data for analytics.

How to integrate external identity providers with Okta

Okta can connect seamlessly to external identity providers. In such an architecture, Okta acts as the user store sitting between the application and the external identity provider(s). The application only needs to connect to Okta, while Okta manages the connections to the external provider(s).

This approach has several benefits, including the following:

  • Single protocol: The application only needs to use the OpenID Connect protocol to integrate with Okta. Okta is responsible for integrating with external providers that may support different protocols.
  • Single source of truth: All user attributes are stored centrally in the Okta Universal Directory.
  • One-to-many user-profile mapping: A user can use different identity providers to sign in, and Okta can link these multiple identity profiles to the same user.

Here’s how the external identity verification works:

  • A user tries to sign in to the application.
  • The application redirects the user to Okta.
  • Okta redirects the user to the external identity provider.
  • The user signs in at the external identity provider.
  • The identity provider redirects the user back to Okta.
  • Okta provisions the user on the Universal Directory.
  • The user is finally redirected back to the application.

How to get started with Okta

To get started with Okta, you need to sign up on the official website and choose a plan that best meets your needs. Once you have registered and logged in successfully, you can follow these five steps to configure a new Okta organization:

  • Import some users from an app or a directory. Okta supports anything-as-a-source, which allows you to integrate with any data source.
  • Configure basic SSO for an application.
  • Create a second admin user.
  • Choose some MFA factors for additional protection.
  • Define a new sign-on policy that configures MFA for all users.

Okta provides application clients and starter kits for multiple languages and frameworks, including PHP, Node.js, Java Spring Boot, JavaScript, React, and Angular. It also provides detailed guides on all the steps you need to take to get started, such as user management, directory integration, app integrations, browser plugins, sign-on policies, MFA, risk-based authentication, and threat analytics.

Conclusion

Okta is a cloud-based identity provider with a diverse feature set. To manage and monitor your Okta logs effectively, please check out our open source plugin from Site24x7. You can also use Okta to implement adaptive multi-factor authentication (MFA), perform identity governance, enable single sign-on (SSO) for all your applications, or enforce passwordless authentication that’s compliant with OAuth standards.

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