Deploying Okta to your own environment has advantages beyond using the best IAM solution in the market. This is commonly known as “eating your own dog food” or, as we prefer to say at ZeroTek, "drinking your own champagne." Using the tools and solutions you sell to your clients has both strategic and practical advantages:
Build credibility and trust with your customers. Show that you believe in the solution to help them feel more secure about purchasing.
Learn best by doing. Gain a deeper understanding of the solution's use cases, strengths, and weaknesses.
Become good at things you do often. When you use and support a standardized tech stack, you reap the efficiency gains, and your customers get fast problem resolution.
Your organization becomes its own case study. Effectively communicating the value of a solution can be difficult. Your daily use speaks volumes.
Customers can sense honesty. Would you choose a solution that the service provider doesn’t use?
Align with your customers. When you use a tech stack similar to your customers, you share their experience and can better understand their requirements. Evolve and define services and best practices that are easy for your customers to adopt.
We've cataloged additional benefits below.
Vendor-neutral flexibility and competitiveness
As a cloud-first, vendor-neutral platform, Okta helps MSPs to:
Produce faster, more reliable deployments – Typically, MSPs can integrate, configure, and deploy an app with secure single sign-on (SSO) through Okta in less than an hour, thanks to Okta's 7800+ pre-built connectors for the apps you and your customers use daily.
Automate rapid user provisioning and deprovisioning for 700+ apps – Leverage Okta’s Lifecycle Management (LCM) to onboard your own MSP staff users with secure access to all the apps they need in minutes and instantly cut off all access when it’s time to offboard.
Choose, switch, or upgrade MSP tools and apps easily – Okta’s vendor-neutral commitment means MSPs can use Okta to secure a growing range of systems and tools—all using a single Okta identity—including:
Google Workspace
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) environments such as VMWare Horizon
VPN solutions
On-prem Active Directory
Apple Mac devices
Stay competitive by evolving your services as you see fit – With Okta, you aren't bound to any specific toolset.
Save money. With Okta, MSPs can eliminate most Microsoft P1 and P2 licenses as well as on-premises Active Directory (and associated server costs).
Higher security and accountability
Okta's industry-leading security platform helps MSPs to:
Prove your security posture – Be the best by using the best solutions.
Reduce the risks of shared Admin accounts – Without Okta, MSPs often have a proliferation of shared admin accounts to meet the needs of multiple customers. Using Okta allows you to eliminate many of these, and lock down the few remaining ones to reduce the risks that shared, high-privilege accounts can represent.
Secure your biggest vulnerability to identity-based attacks: email.
Reduce Microsoft latency-related security gaps – Okta policy updates performed in ZeroTek or Okta occur instantly; in Microsoft, policy updates can take up to 24 hours to take effect.
Gain a comprehensive view of all technician activity across all Okta customers for efficiency and accountability – Only ZeroTek delivers this level of visibility across all Okta orgs.
Manage powerful adaptive security policies easily – Okta's powerful policy engine is easier and more intuitive to configure than any other option—all managed from ZeroTek.
Achieve MSP best practices – Use ZeroTek's system-based access roles to configure least-privileged access for your staff to customer Okta orgs.
Rapid internal confidence with Okta
Deploying Okta internally allows MSPs to:
Gain valuable hands-on experience with Okta and ZeroTek – You and your team are guided through field-tested best practices by experts who are Okta certified at the highest level.
Get familiar with every aspect of a successful rollout – Deploying internally provides practical guidelines for scoping an Okta deployment and deep insight into what a well-planned rollout involves.
Develop company-wide competence quickly – With daily use, your team can ramp up quickly to confidently deliver great IAM services that delight your customers.