App Awareness Month – Okta

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. This week we’re focusing on admin tools that help make Google Apps domain administrators’ lives easier! The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

Okta – Enterprise Grade Identity Management from the Cloud

As the number of SaaS applications used by both large enterprises and small businesses grows, it’s becoming harder and harder to create secure and varied logins, not to mention remember them all!  That’s where Okta, a member of the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps, comes in.

Okta offers secure single sign-on (SSO) that integrates with literally thousands of applications, whether they’re in the cloud or behind secure firewalls. And the application is extremely easy to enable – admins create a user and then select the applications that user is allowed to access. Users then receive custom portals where they can gain access to all of their applications.

Google Apps Integration

Okta created Directory Integration for Google to provide a better experience for Google Apps admins and end-users. The product simplifies the initial rollout of Google Apps and SSO capabilities make managing access to third-party products for Google Apps as well as stand alone cloud apps like Zendesk and Salesforce easy to manage.

Why We Like It

Okta is a simple and flexible solution that enables you to securely manage all your web applications regardless of the authentication and user management methods they support or whether they run inside or outside the organization’s firewall. Okta requires no up-front investments in hardware, software or development time and a consumer-like experience for users and simple but robust directory and application integrations for administrators enable Okta to deliver cloud SSO and user management in minutes. We think its a must-have for organizations that work with multiple applications daily.

Okta offers a free 30-day trial and starts at $1 per user per month. To download the application, check out Okta in the Google Apps Marketplace.  

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These products not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.