New Okta Identity Tool Helps Address Traffic Bursts At Large Businesses

Okta DynamicScale will make it easier for large organizations to authenticate the traffic generated by immersive digital experiences through a single product rather than one-off services.

Okta has introduced an identity offering that gives large enterprises enough capacity and infrastructure to scale during periods of high traffic.

The San Francisco-based identity provider said Okta DynamicScale will make it easier for large businesses to authenticate the traffic generated by immersive digital experiences through a single product rather than one-off services, according to Chief Product Officer Diya Jolly.

Prior to Okta DynamicScale, Jolly said large companies dealing with major spikes in web traffic would have to anticipate in advance exactly when the spike was going to happen and pre-emptively carve out the infrastructure needed to support that. But now, Jolly told CRN that Okta can scale up infrastructure and workloads to a level predetermined by the customer in very short order.

[Related: Okta To Buy Workflow Automation Startup Azuqua For $52.5 Million]

“Okta has gone far beyond the current landscape to not only meet the dynamic and diverse identity needs of the largest sites and apps on the internet today, but to create the identity infrastructure of the future,” Jolly said in a statement.

The offering enables enterprise DevOps teams to extend their existing Okta API rate limits to up to 500,000 authentications per minute to handle a planned or unforeseen surge in traffic, according to the company. As a result, Okta said the traffic surge won’t have a negative impact on the end user’s experience.

The setup and testing process previously required to scale up capacity could last anywhere from three weeks to six weeks depending on the readiness of the customer’s other systems, Jolly said. But since the infrastructure hooks and connections are already in place with Okta DynamicScale, Jolly said enterprises can complete the testing process for the additional capacity in just hours.

Okta DynamicScale is primarily intended for businesses with more than $1 billion in revenue that have large, externally facing websites and applications, Jolly said. For example, businesses like Major League Baseball and higher-education teaching and learning material provider Cengage need to be able to scale their identity workflows to provide a completely seamless and secure experience, she said.

DynamicScale is an add-on SKU, meaning that the pricing will depend on what identity products the current or prospective customer is using. Pricing for Okta’s customer identity products is based on the average monthly users for various pieces of identity workflows, according to the company.

As the world gets more and more digital, Jolly said the digital capacity required on a per-customer basis will continue to climb. As a result, Jolly said Okta’s identity offerings need to scale accordingly to continue supporting authentication around those digital experiences.

Unexpected spikes in traffic could be the result of an outcome of a particular sporting event or a viral video that takes off from nowhere, Jolly said. Businesses can often predict the capacity they’ll need during a spike, Jolly said, but might not have a sense of when the spike is actually going to happen.

Okta DynamicScale will give partners another way to assist customers with scaling their digital experiences without negatively impacting either security or identity, Jolly said. Whenever a business has that much traffic, Jolly said it will often need help figuring out how much traffic to expect and when it will spike, and she said the new offering gives partners an opportunity to become part of that conversation.

“This is a fantastic opportunity to help large organizations,” Jolly said.