A mobile workforce has to be both secure and easy, says Okta exec

Okta is an enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco that focuses on identity and access management.

Just this week the company took its Identity and Mobility Forum to Sydney for the first time. The organisation has a few thousand customers in locations around the world, including APAC (Asia Pacific).

Ed Sawma, product marketing director at Okta, led a keynote addressing mobility in the workforce.

Sawma says that with mobility, a lot of it is about reclaiming unproductive time during the day, making employees time more effective.

"You're checking your phone constantly. 90% of people use smartphones to work toward goals while out and about. So mobile is really changing the way we work, it's changing how we interact with our co-workers how we're able to get things done," he explains.

"I know that if I'm out and about and I'm thinking about something about work I'll send someone a quick email or go into Salesforce and check a report on something. It's this ability to continuously do things that's important," he adds.

Sawma explains that mobile also enables us to reimagine business processes, he also adds that security is a super important factor.

"You've got to make things secure, but make it easy for an end user," he says.

"So it's really about this 24-hour availability and ability to be productive in different places. That's why at Okta, we came up with contextual access management.

This feature is across all of Okta's products, it's a set of capabilities where the company connects users to apps with API access management and also connects apps to APIs.

"It's really about delivering easy access, adaptive policy and smart actions," says Sawma.

"With our single sign on product we're adding your end user capability around notifications and giving an end user a notification if there's a log in from an unknown device," he adds.

"We're doing this in a more comprehensive and flexible way than anything else out there."