Professional Social Networking Leader LinkedIn Uses Okta to Securely Scale Their Expanding Cloud IT Infrastructure Necessary to Support Rapid Company Growth

SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwire - Jan 25, 2012) - Today, Okta, the leading on-demand identity and access management service, released a case study with their customer LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network used by more than 135 million people worldwide. LinkedIn relies on Okta to secure and manage access to their cloud and on-premises web applications for their more than 2,000 employees worldwide.

LinkedIn's rapid employee growth created management, security and deployment challenges for their IT team, especially for their ever-expanding usage of cloud applications. LinkedIn's lean IT organization was strained trying to manage access to these applications and from integrating these apps back to LinkedIn's corporate directory in a one-off fashion; this also raised security concerns and drove up administrative costs. LinkedIn wanted to put a platform in place to centrally secure and manage the rollout of these applications to employees. Employees, in turn, struggled to remember the URLs and passwords for the ever-increasing number of apps they used on a daily basis. As a result, employees were not able to always get access to apps when they needed them and they often spent valuable time with IT resetting forgotten passwords.

LinkedIn began using Okta in 2010 to address these challenges and to help securely scale its cloud IT infrastructure. Today, thanks to Okta, LinkedIn has been able to extend secure single sign-on to the company's more than 20 cloud applications and centralize and secure their integration with Active Directory (AD). Okta has also freed LinkedIn's IT organization to more quickly roll out new services for the business, rather than spend valuable time managing access and resetting passwords for existing systems. With Okta, LinkedIn has been able to:

• Provide a platform to secure the adoption and usage of cloud applications
• Eliminate $87,000 annually associated with AD integration
• Improve employee access to cloud apps, resulting in a $240,000 annual productivity gain
• Reduce provisioning and de-provisioning costs by 30 percent annually
• Accelerate cloud adoption with single sign-on access for all employees, and provide greater visibility into SaaS usage for IT
• Increase regulatory compliance with an auditable set of access and deprovisioning reports across all applications

Comments on the News:

"Our rapid adoption of SaaS solutions required us to rethink how we secure and manage our cloud apps and integrate them with Active Directory. We knew we wanted a service to solve these issues, not more on-premises software that we would need to manage," said Mike Jennings, senior director of corporate IT, LinkedIn. "Okta has helped us increase security, reduce costs and make our users' lives easier. Working with Okta has also been very easy -- they are extremely knowledgeable about the cloud and are always willing to do whatever it takes to make LinkedIn and our cloud strategy successful."

"More than ever, businesses are turning to the cloud to give their employees access to the applications they need to get work done. This shift presents a challenge to IT departments everywhere, which now must secure and scale cloud applications across all locations and devices," said Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder of Okta. "Okta addresses this challenge by helping enterprises secure and manage their move to the cloud, whether the company is just beginning to apply cloud technologies, or, like LinkedIn, relies on multiple cloud apps to run their business."

About LinkedIn:
Founded in 2003, LinkedIn connects the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. With more than 120 million members worldwide, including executives from every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network on the Internet. The company has a diversified business model with revenues coming from member subscriptions, marketing solutions and hiring solutions. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, LinkedIn also has offices across North America, as well as throughout Europe and Asia and in India and Australia.

About Okta:
Okta is the market leading on-demand identity and access management service that enables enterprises to accelerate the secure adoption of their web-based applications, both in the cloud and behind the firewall. Okta delivers a complete solution addressing the needs of IT, end-users, and business leaders; no customization required.

Okta's initial service is built on a secure, reliable and extensible on-demand, multi-tenant cloud services platform. That platform will be the foundation for a growing set of core Okta and partner services that empower businesses to eliminate cloud adoption barriers and unlock the potential of the cloud for enterprise users everywhere.

The Okta team has built, deployed, and supported market leading, on-demand and enterprise software solutions from companies including Salesforce.com, SuccessFactors, PeopleSoft, Microsoft, Sun and HP. Okta is backed by premiere angel and venture investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, and FLOODGATE. For more information, visit us at www.okta.com or follow us on www.okta.com/blog.