BetterCloud, the leading SaaS operations management platform, today announced a partnership with Okta, Inc., the leading independent provider of identity for the enterprise, and the launch of the BetterCloud Connector for Okta. The technology integration and partnership helps organizations provide simple, secure user access while meeting the day-to-day operational management and security requirements for their mission-critical SaaS applications. Joint customers can now define, execute and manage policies for both identity and access and application configuration and data management.

"Enterprises are facing a massive SaaS sprawl today, making it more difficult and time consuming than ever to manage and secure business-critical data across their application stack," said Shreyas Sadalgi, Chief Business Strategy Officer of BetterCloud. "We have reached a tipping point with SaaS, where applications are now a common system of record for many organizations. IT is up against a growing mountain of repetitive operational and administrative work to manage their SaaS app stack. Okta and BetterCloud provide unique and complementary 'systems of controls' around managing identity and access and operations for SaaS applications, which is why our partnership with Okta is so important. The success of our joint customers is our top priority. We're thrilled to partner with Okta to make identity security and IT operations easier."

It takes organizations an average of 66 days to contain a breach, according to the Ponemon Institute. Manual processes and silos between security and IT teams make it difficult for security teams to keep up with alerts and resolve security incidents and vulnerabilities related to their SaaS applications. The BetterCloud Connector for Okta helps organizations drastically shorten the time they are exposed to SaaS application related risks. The integration helps organizations quickly and easily see critical alerts, activity and extended user information from the Okta Identity Cloud within BetterCloud so they can better assess the incident in-depth and take immediate action across Okta and the related SaaS applications.

Together, BetterCloud and the Okta Identity Cloud provide organizations with a strong policy management solution that securely and effectively authenticates, provisions and governs configuration, settings and data within SaaS applications across the enterprise. Through the integration, customers can:

• Leverage Okta identities for IT workflow orchestration and SSO - The Okta Universal Directory integration to BetterCloud allows organizations to set up and execute critical security and management workflows across applications that can be triggered directly from identity lifecycle changes within Okta when someone joins, changes positions, or leaves the organization. IT and security administrators can also now single-sign-on into BetterCloud's platform using their Okta identities.
  
• Cut resolution time of security incidents with continuous monitoring and automated  policy remediation - BetterCloud's ongoing monitoring of Okta's identity data feed and event feeds from other SaaS applications enables security teams to view both user and application related security incidents in one place within BetterCloud. Security teams obtain a real-time view of 100+ types of alerts related to user and admin activity such as login failures, sensitive data sharing changes, 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 200+ remediation admin actions, such as changing group membership settings; unsharing resources such as files, calendars, Slack Channels and Dropbox folders; assigning licenses; resetting passwords; enforcing least privilege access to applications; removing mobile device access; transferring documents and suspending user accounts.
  
• Save IT time with complete automation and control for application configuration & settings - IT can now fully set up and automate routine processes such as user onboarding and offboarding conveniently in one place. A BetterCloud policy workflow can be defined to run a custom sequence of hundreds of actions across applications - from granting user access and provisioning users to 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.

"The 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," said Monty Gray, senior vice president of Corporate Development, Okta. "Through our partnership with BetterCloud, we're enabling companies to leverage the power of Okta's identity-driven security solutions and BetterCloud's continuous security assessment of SaaS application data and configurations. Together, we'll empower organizations to automate critical IT processes for SaaS admin tasks, save IT and security teams precious time, and reduce overall business risk by identifying and stopping incidents as soon as they arise."

Organizations such as Peloton Interactive are already using BetterCloud and Okta today to address their unique access and operational management requirements.

"The use of SaaS at Peloton has increased exponentially in the last few years, creating unforeseen security challenges as well as a ton of administrative and operational work," said Dave Brown, Director of Enterprise Technology at Peloton. "We're thrilled to see BetterCloud and Okta team up to provide the visibility, security and access control over the applications our employees need to stay productive."

BetterCloud and Okta are recognized as market leaders in their respective market categories. BetterCloud has been recognized by Gartner Inc. in its inaugural Cloud Office Management Market Guide and by 451 Research as a pioneer in the SaaS Operations Management market. Okta was named by Gartner Inc. as a Leader in its inaugural Magic Quadrant for Access Management, Worldwide and named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Identity-As-A-Service, Q4 2017.