Insight from Oktane18: Integrations crucial to secure collaboration

Last week, we traveled to Las Vegas for the Oktane18 conference to hear insights from top IT pros, cloud experts, and developers.

While we were there, Bryan Mann, Head of Enterprise Architecture at Dropbox, spoke with industry leaders Cori Biruk, Director of Collaboration and SaaS at Dow Jones, Javier Ruiz, Systems Engineer at Silicon Labs, and Jarel Jones, Senior Cloud Systems Administrator at National Geographic Society.

Here are eight takeaways from that conversation.

Integration capabilities have become a primary purchasing decision

“I look for solutions that have an API that potentially works with other companies. We look at how it can integrate with what we currently have.”—Cori Biruk

Maintaining a good balance for UX and security helps the whole team

“Always automate if you can. You want everything to be seamless. The integration is so tight right now with Okta and Dropbox, it makes it easy for the admin side and the user side.”—Javier Ruiz

Too many SaaS applications don’t support automated provisioning

“We spend a lot of time right now manually creating accounts in various SaaS apps. That takes up a lot of time.”—Jarel Jones

Configuration across mobile SaaS is one of the biggest challenges

“Being a news organization, we have a lot of rules around legacy information... So keeping that consistent basis across SaaS applications is a challenge. We look to solve for that using whatever tools we have and working with different department to get the applications set up.”—Cori Biruk

Individuals purchasing their own applications is an ongoing issue

“We had a lot of our employees bring in this application. It wasn’t integrated into our system. It wasn’t authenticated… so it becomes a security risk.”—Cori Biruk

Using Vera provides an additional policy layer for data protection

“End users could create a Dropbox group on the fly and that would get pushed to Okta and Vera. All of those controls and policies are automatically getting taken care of.”—Javier Ruiz

Transparency can help address Shadow IT issues

“We really try to solve that by being as transparent as possible to our users, showing a list of all the applications that are available to them. We do a lot of end user trainings.”—Javier Ruiz

Having employees and external collaborators on one platform makes collaboration easier

“With all our employees in Okta and everyone provisioned with Dropbox accounts, it made it easy to make sure everything was flowing through one direction. We could put all of our policies on top to make sure things were going where they were supposed to.”—Jarel Jones

Together, Okta and Dropbox power secure collaboration with advanced security services and a full mobility management suite that supports Dropbox EMM.

To learn how our integration can help you simplify user lifecycle management and provide secure access to apps with single sign-on, connect Okta to Dropbox.

For tips on powering team collaboration, download our eBook, Flow Together .