Identity management company Okta took in $75 million in a series E financing round, bringing total funding to $155 million. Okta plans to use the cash to open a new office in Sydney, Australia and invest in its enterprise identity network platform.
In today's world of cloud and SaaS deployment, it's hard for a company to manage who has access to what in its internal network. While in the past a system administrator could set up a virtual private network (VPN) to prevent unwanted entry, an organization that now has its infrastructure spread over several cloud providers has a more difficult task to accurately monitor company access. Couple that with the fact that employees are now using mobile devices to gain entrance, and identity monitoring becomes much more of a pain.
Okta wants to remedy this with its cloud-based service that functions as an IT monitoring tool. After signing up for the service, a user can install Okta's on-premise software and tie it in with his Active Directory or other network tracking services, said Okta COO Frederic Kerrest. From there, a company can then configure its cloud services to use Octa so the software can communicate back to the cloud, thus blanketing a company's cloud infrastructure with the same information the administrators already set up in their original firewall.
If an organization were to use Salesforce.com(s crm) as its CRM system, using Okta will ensure that when a person leaves the company, it will be much easier for the company to turn off that person's access to Salesforce and other such services.
Okta is not the only company creating identity management tools, Kerrest said, as legacy companies like IBM and Oracle have their own offerings as well. Security startups are also getting into the identity management space; in May Tel-Aviv-based startup FortyCloud launched a security-as-a-service product that functions as a modern day firewall in the cloud.
Okta has roughly 350 employees and a customer base numbering over a thousand enterprises, including Allergan, LinkedIn and Western Union, Kerrest said.
In the past year, the San Francisco-based company claims it has doubled its headcount and added a London office.
Janus Capital Group and Altimeter Capital were new investors along with Sequoia Capital who led the round and previous investors Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners and Khosla Ventures.
Sequoia Capital partner Pat Grady is also coming on board to Okta's board of directors.