Andy (buynholdisdead) kindly allowed me to cross-post an excerpt from his excellent post on the MF Stock Advisor Okta board (again, if you are not a Stock Advisor subscriber, you should be as one great recommendation will pay for 20 or 30 years subscriptions). The following is Andy’s words:
…I was curious where the passwords were stored with OKTA. All passwords are stored with OKTA. Your company Admin can not even see the password.
Okta must be available for any other app to be accessed and therefore there’s no good time to be down. As a result we are built for high availability – no planned downtime, no maintenance windows - and we guarantee 99.9% uptime…
Yes, your information is secure. Okta protects your information with extensive security measures and controls that are audited by third parties. Among other measures, Okta offers flexible, MultiFactor Authentication. With MFA, you’ll authenticate yourself with both your regular password and a second factor of your choice. For example, you may authenticate with a pin number that you receive via text message, a six-digit soft token, a security question, or by simply accepting a push notification on your phone through the Okta Verify app.
Yes, Okta protects your information with rigorous security measures and controls. These controls are audited and attested to in our SOC2 report, and all passwords are 256-bit AES encrypted. For more information see: https://www.okta.com/security. Just as we use strong encryption to secure your data at Okta, we use strong (256-bit AES) encryption for your username and password credentials as well. This information is stored and maintained by Okta.
Before Okta IPO’d many companies tried to buy them out, but Okta did not want to go that route. They wanted to IPO … Okta works with any of the cloud companies and I could see one of them trying to buy Okta out, but I do think Okta would fight against it for the following reason:
The customers of Okta have to be able to trust the company. If that trust is broken, then so is the company. Okta controls the keys to the kingdom and once they get into kingdom, that is their moat. They build relations with all of the companies they work with at a much deeper level in my opinion. This isn’t like any Software as a Service company. How many companies are going to be able to convince someone else and give up their passwords?..
…Okta is gaining customers at 8% to 10% per quarter sequentially… Every customer they gain will only keep paying them a subscription and even buying more product from them.
Andy
Here is the site that Andy pulled the information from :
https://www.okta.com/faq/
[Saul here] Just thinking about what Andy pointed out, it points out how incredibly unlikely it would be for any company to change away from Okta once they sign on. Once you entrust a company with all the keys to everything in your company, you are not going to suddenly decide that you’ll try another company. It’s a question of trust! And if Google or Facebook or Microsoft or some other BIG company came up with a similar solution, do you think another company is going to leave Okta and trust one of those giants with all their passwords. No way! Okta has them forever!
Just my opinion!
Saul