Okta is an enterprise identity and access management platform that provides single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and lifecycle management for organizations. While Auth0 and Clerk focus on customer-facing authentication, Okta's core strength is managing employee access to the dozens or hundreds of applications a modern organization uses. For custom web application development, Okta integration is frequently required when building enterprise tools that need to authenticate against a company's existing identity provider. Implementing SAML SSO or OIDC federation with Okta means employees can access the custom application using the same credentials they use for all their other work tools.
The Backstory
Okta was founded in 2009 by Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest, both former Salesforce executives. McKinnon had been Salesforce's Vice President of Engineering, where he managed one of the largest cloud computing platforms in the world. He recognized that as companies adopted more cloud applications, managing employee identity and access across all those applications was becoming a critical unsolved problem. McKinnon and Kerrest started Okta to build a cloud-native identity layer that could sit in front of every application an organization used. The company went public in 2017 and grew to serve over 18,000 customers, including major enterprises and government agencies.
Under the Hood
In a deeply ironic twist for a security company, Okta itself was breached in January 2022 when the Lapsus$ hacking group gained access to a third-party support engineer's laptop and was able to view internal Okta systems. Okta initially downplayed the incident, saying it affected only a small number of customers, but later revised its disclosure. The breach highlighted the paradox of being a security company: while Okta's products are designed to protect other organizations, the company's own systems are a high-value target precisely because compromising Okta could potentially provide access to all the organizations that depend on it for authentication.
Visit: okta.com