SaaS Identity + Security Operations Management with BetterCloud and Okta

This post originally appeared on Okta’s Security Blog. 

After nine months of hard work, we’re excited to launch our new baby into the world: BetterCloud’s technology integration and partnership with Okta. With over 200 mutual customers using both platforms, we had the opportunity to collaborate with ten of these joint customers at Oktane17—where our product teams gathered extensive feedback and requirements in a roundtable discussion. Based on this input, we’ve built our Okta integration from the ground up. BetterCloud is now recognized as an Okta Integration Network (OIN) partner in the categories of workflow orchestration and security analytics. Together, Okta and BetterCloud provide unique and complementary ‘systems of controls’ around managing identity and security operations for SaaS applications.

Similar to how Okta pioneered the industry’s first, and now leading cloud identity offering, BetterCloud has pioneered a new category—SaaS Operations Management (SOM)—and with 2,500+ customers automating millions of policies, our platform is quickly becoming the de facto solution for managing and securing mission-critical SaaS apps. BetterCloud enables customers to centralize administration across SaaS apps, uncover security blind spots, and automate manual security and IT processes.

The SaaS threat landscape continues to evolve at an alarming rate, leaving security and operational IT teams with the challenge of quickly identifying and mitigating potential threats. The BetterCloud Connector for Okta helps organizations drastically shorten the time they are exposed to SaaS application related risks. The integration helps security teams quickly and easily view critical alerts, activity, and extended user information from the Okta Identity Cloud within BetterCloud. This enables them to better assess the incident in-depth and take immediate action across Okta and the related SaaS applications.

How Does BetterCloud Complement Okta?

As the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise, Okta handles the user identity and access management policies across SaaS applications. BetterCloud manages granular policies for data security, app configuration, administrator entitlements, and user/admin activity inside SaaS apps.

Our partnership allows companies to leverage the power of Okta’s identity-driven security solutions and BetterCloud’s continuous security assessment of SaaS application data and configurations. By integrating into Okta’s identity platform and ingesting the full identity context of users and groups, BetterCloud provides a single place to view and manage user and data entitlements across applications. This enables complete IT and security workflow orchestration for application configuration and settings. The two platforms complement each other to not only protect against negligent or malicious security misconfigurations within SaaS apps, but also automate cross-application security and management policies to remediate blind spots.

What Are the Use Cases for This BetterCloud + Okta Integration?

Our mutual customers identified two key use cases that our technology integration now delivers:

1. Ensure operational security with automated user offboarding

Customers use Okta as their identity provider and system of record for identity lifecycle events. With Okta, customers can automatically provision and deprovision users in apps, which is the first and critical step of an onboarding/offboarding process. For offboarding, IT admins are still left with manual, time-consuming steps for securely carrying out the rest of the process. For example, completely offboarding an employee is cumbersome—transferring their documents, transferring/removing calendar events, revoking access to third-party apps, changing native group memberships, waiting for 30 days, then deleting user licenses. People put it off, much like chores or taxes, or they just forget to do certain steps altogether.

Security and IT can now fully set up and automate routine processes conveniently in BetterCloud, tied to Okta lifecycle events. A BetterCloud policy workflow can be defined to run a custom sequence of hundreds of actions across applications—from revoking user access and deprovisioning users from applications within Okta, to configuring specific settings across SaaS applications (for files, calendars, groups, channels, etc.) including ones not available in the native application admin consoles:

2. Protect against security blind spots with automated policy enforcement

Recent news headlines (like Hundreds of Companies Expose PII, Private Emails Through Google Groups Error, or Why Slack, Chatbots, And Freelance Workers Have Your IT Department Freaking Out) are indicative of threats looming in SaaS apps. IT has no way to get visibility into these hidden threats—aka “blind spots,” something they didn’t even know existed—until a security incident occurs. BetterCloud combines continuous monitoring of Okta’s identity data feed with event feeds from other SaaS applications enables security teams to view both user- and application-related security incidents in one place.

Security teams obtain a real-time view of over 100 types of alerts related to user and admin activity, such as login failures, sensitive data sharing changes, and administrator elevation changes. By leveraging user context and profiles within applications, organizations can remediate incidents with automated policies that invoke admin actions within Okta or other SaaS applications. They can take more than 200 remediation admin actions, including changing group membership settings; unsharing resources such as files, calendars, Slack channels, and Dropbox folders; and assigning and deleting licenses:

This integration was born from conversations our teams had at Oktane17, and we’re excited to launch it at Oktane18! BetterCloud is a Silver Plus sponsor at the Oktane18 conference. Come and visit the BetterCloud booth for a live demo of the integration!