Apr 14, 2023

iTWire Friday, 14 April 2023 09:43 VIDEO INTERVIEW: Okta and SafetyCulture talk digital native businesses and the right tools and partners for the job 0 Guest Interview and Case Study: When one of the world's great global identity companies meets one of the world's great global tech companies with an operations platform that unlocks the power of observation at scale, both companies get to work on their core competencies, multiplying the value that's delivered, with this great "fireside chat" style discussion between myself, Richard Marr of Okta, and James Simpson from SafetyCulture available to watch below! In today’s environment of escalating cyberattacks and rising privacy concerns among consumers, Okta  knows it’s imperative that digital native businesses, which are those born in the digital native era, provide a superior customer experience while also staying secure and preserving customer data privacy. SafetyCulture  is one digital native business that understands this and relies on Okta for customer-facing identity. SafetyCulture is a B2B SaaS vendor that is using Okta's Customer Identity Cloud powered by Auth0 , a customisable customer identity solution that helps organisations resolve the tension between security, privacy, and user experience for their customers, and reinforces Okta’s commitment to free everyone to safely access any technology, so customers can focus on innovation. Article continues below display ad, video is also a little further below: Here's how SafetyCulture is using the Okta Customer Identity Cloud to address a number of problems related to authentication and authorisation in their software platform: Managing user authentication: Involves verifying the identity of users attempting to access their software applications. With Okta, SafetyCulture can use a range of authentication methods, including federation/SSO, social logins, multi-factor authentication, and passwordless authentication. Implementing authorisation: Okta also helps implement authorisation, which involves determining what actions users are authorised to perform within a software application. B2B SaaS vendors can use Okta to create access policies and roles to control user permissions and access to different parts of their applications. Streamlining user management: Okta can help streamline user management for B2B SaaS vendors by centralising user data and providing tools for user onboarding, offboarding, and other user lifecycle management tasks. This helps save time and resources and reduces the risk of security breaches. Ensuring security and compliance: Okta can help B2B SaaS vendors like SafetyCulture ensure the security and compliance of their software applications by providing features such as encryption, tokenization, and audit logging. Okta also has compliance certifications such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, which can help meet regulatory requirements and pass security audits. The benefits that SafetyCulture experienced include: Faster time-to-market: Quickly integrate authentication and authorisation features into their applications, reducing the time and resources needed to build and maintain these features from scratch. Improved user experience: Okta's range of authentication methods and user management tools can help improve the user experience of B2B SaaS applications, making it easier for users to access and use the software. Increased security and compliance: Okta's security and compliance features can help B2B SaaS vendors ensure the security and compliance of their applications, reducing the risk of data breaches and other security incidents. Scalability: Okta can scale to meet the needs of B2B SaaS vendors as their user base grows, ensuring that authentication and authorisation remain reliable and performant even under heavy usage. So, whether it's the tennis matches made in heaven at the Australian Open, where SafetyCulture’s solutions were in action, or the match made in heaven when Okta's identity solutions seamlessly enable SafetyCulture to focus on what they do best, rather than building a mini-Okta inside their business, business can be accelerated at scale, with both companies free to do what they do best. In a free world where companies use the best technologies they can find to improve their own tech stack and business success, the case study below is a great example of this absolutely being a reality that delivers tangible benefits all around. The full transcript of the video interview below is between myself, and between Richard Marr , the GM of Digital Native Business at Okta, and James Simpson , the CTO of SafetyCulture, and demonstrates this ably, so please feel free to watch the video interview, or read through the transcript, and see the synergy for yourself: Here is the full transcript, slightly edited for clarity, with the video above the full source for the text below: Alex Zaharov-Reutt, iTWireTV: Well, hello and thank you for joining me for another Alex On Tech and iTWireTV interview. Today I'm joined by Richard Marr on my left - he's the General Manager of Digital Native Business APJ at Okta, and on my right is James Simpson, the CTO at SafetyCulture. Welcome both to the program! Richard Marr, GM of Digital Native Business at Okta: Thanks, Alex. Great to be here. James Simpson, CTO at SafetyCulture: Thanks for having me. Alex: Thank you for taking the time. Now, can we just start by each of you giving us a quick wrap up of your respective companies in 2023? Richard: Yeah, I'll go first, Okta provides identity as a service. And that could be from the way your workforce or employees need to access their applications in the morning when they log in, or your extended customers and partners and the way they access your applications, or in the case of SafetyCulture, it's their end B2B customers, as well. So whether it's workforce identity, and customers, and we provide a platform that allows you to connect your customers and your employees to your application securely, etc. So that's what we do. James: Ww started about 10 years ago, a solution for helping companies with compliance and quality and safety, hence SafetyCulture is the name. It started, I guess what you'd think of as as like a checklist, and since then it's become ever more sophisticated, and does a lot more for people than a checklist could do. And we're in the process of evolving into an operations platform. So, in addition to helping people inspect things, such as for quality and compliance, we're looking at the other aspects of running a business, the other processes that need need support. And from the early days, they're working with Xero, and now Okta, they've been a really valuable partner to help us with that evolution. Alex: And James, you're a digital native business, I mean, Okta works with digital native technologies. Why did you, in more detail, choose their identity solutions? What's the story of your journey in that regard? And what are your comments about that? James: Like a lot of businesses, it's not uncommon, we have a homegrown solution that we built ourselves, to manage users and identities and customers. And, as the business became more complicated, we were asking more and more of that software. And it became increasingly difficult to firstly keep up, certainly difficult to anticipate what was coming. So we worked with Okta to look at how their solution for identity management might take away the need for having a homegrown solution. And, the more we looked at the problems and things like performance, scalability, security, and reliability, they would be the big four. The cost and the time for us to take care of those four issues ourselves - it was just too much. It wasn't just a straightforward time and dollars thing, it was also an expertise thing. To do these things really well requires some subject matter expertise and deep knowledge that our people are great, but that's just not where they come from those issues. So that's what led us to Okta. Alex: Richard: Yeah. James, I think, candidly, you're a fantastic and canonical customer, for Okta. So SafetyCulture is a very successful unicorn in Australian tech - B2B SaaS. And so when we look at other B2B/SaaS organisations or even B2C digital native businesses, think of e-commerce marketplace, agritech, retail - they've got these large engineering teams. And they want to focus on their core, and focus on innovation rather than worrying about sign up, registration, forgotten password, multifactor, single sign on, Federation, - all these things to manage their users and access to their applications. We recently did a survey of about 400 digital native businesses across Asia Pac and Japan, and 66% of them are in fact building their own customer identity service. And, so it's just this huge opportunity that we see, much like if you think of AWS as the infrastructure or Stripe is to payments or Twilio is to messaging, we see this huge opportunity where we can help unlock developers and engineers to focus on innovation, rather than a sole problem like identity, and get the focus on the core. And the other side, the other problem that we see is, it's the front door - identity is the front door, the way that your customers access your application. And if there's a bit of friction there, it's hard to open, it's hard to get on-boarded, hard to sign up. Or if you've got multiple products like SafetyCulture has, you've acquired EdApp, and others and if you don't, if you've got multiple doors for those customers, it's a bit of a disconnected experience and not a highly personalised experience. So we see it covering innovation, helping innovation, focusing on the customer experience, and of course, increasing security as well. So it really ticks a lot of those boxes. James: Yeah. For us, it was also a choice between generalisation and specialisation. So our engineering team can apply themselves to a range of problems in the business operations space and be good at that. But when it comes to things like customer identity and security, at best, would be would be generalists. I think we could do it, I think we would do a good job, but it would take time. We would not have the expert skill that specialists are going to have so in our decision to work with Xero in that day, there was a recognition that on some things, it's just better to go with specialists as opposed to generalists. Richard: Yeah. Actually I spoke to the CTPO, and it's not a competitor, it's MYOB, so another B2B SaaS business. And he was saying to me, Darren was saying to me, and I'm sure he won't mind me sharing that "let's focus on doing a few things really well than trying to do a lot of things really well, like what, what really makes us different as a business." It's not so much the cost of the engineering resource. It's like you can get engineers and like, they're not cheap, but it's more the opportunity cost of where you're spending good engineers as well. James: Richard: James: And, even though this is an important, important topic, we made the decision, that's not one that we want to solve. We're going to solve other problems for our customers, and you can solve this one for us. Richard: I think the interesting thing, Alex, as well, when I think about the journey of SafetyCulture, with Okta, it feels like it's a five, six year journey, I had a little bit more hair and you know, back then, but not as many greys. It really started when the first requirement, when there was a large customer that wanted to access their service and they wanted to federate, and allow their users, their employees to sign on to the SafetyCulture service, using their corporate credentials. And as James was saying, sure, we could build it. And then another customer asked for it. And they're using Active Directory. Another one's using Okta, another one's using ADFS, another one's using God knows what. And they could just keep building and maintaining that. And I think that was the point where the engineering team said, okay, well, let's solve that problem. And then over time, it was just more and more requirements. And then eventually, looking after all of the customer facing identity for SafetyCulture, which has been a phenomenal journey. James: Yeah, but for us, it started off with SSO. That's absolutely where it started. And we we initially thought, well, that was the extent of what we're going to be able to solve there. We spent probably half a day with some of your focus and some of your technical specialists, to have a look at everything else that you could solve. And that's when I think the penny dropped for us. Okay, SSOs, just a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of what we could do. So we went from SSO to everything we do now. Richard: And going great guns, as well, SafetyCulture, by the way, I love what you guys do with the tennis - the Australian Open, by the way. James: Alex: Tell us a little bit briefly about that. I mean, I'm assuming it wasn't just ads in the background. Richard: James: Look in 20, 30 seconds or less - the AO is an enormous event. And it has something around 12,000 people who contribute and participate in running and organising that event. And there's a lot of things that have to go right. And then they have to go right the first time. So, our solution was used to help build the compliance and quality and [lanning systems that AO used to make the event run right the first time. It was it was really about servicing those 12,000 people to do their jobs better. Richard: And a little tidbit, James. I'll tell you - my house - the new house that I'm sitting in, they (the builders) used SafetyCulture to manage the compliance for my house build as well, believe it or not, so, the Australian Open down to my little old house. Alex: I was just going to say, one of the things that I always like to talk to with vendors is about the fact their clients can be their best R&D division, because they have pain points that they want to solve. And so I just wanted to ask James, was there anything that you said to Okta - "hey, we want you to help us with this, or create this, or do this, and have you asked them that question, and have they brought features forward to enable you to do something that they weren't quite doing yet?" James: Look, I think for us, the main worry I had, as the CTO and I know, my colleagues feel the same way - is reliability. Because it's the front door solution for all of our customers. If that piece is unavailable, or it goes down for any reason, the business is dead, everywhere, dead, all in one go. So it's part of a solution that has to be rock solid. And yes, we can do that. We've got engineers that can put that all together, but it's a lot of work, and it's hard work. And so on that day, where we worked with some of the technical specialists there (at Okta), and so, it became obvious that the task of providing that reliability was just not something that was sensible for us to engage in. And so that's where we partnered with Okta to do that. So for us - reliability. Alex: And, Richard, are there, in brief, any features that some of the other customers have asked for and you thought, Wow, that's a great idea. And you've basically gotten your engineers to develop that quickly, to make it reliable, and you've launched it? Richard: Yeah, I think we're recently seeing a lot of requirements around balancing. There's this constant friction between balancing security and customer experience. MFA is a good example. You get the one time code you put the code in, it's like a friction point for customers. So we're doing a lot of work working with our customers around "how do you have this dial that only goes up when it needs to go up to introduce security measures?" So detecting signals, like "impossible travel", or hang on, Richard normally logged in from Sydney, Australia, why is he logging from Singapore? Oh, hang on - he's logging with a new iPhone 14 Pro, we haven't seen that device before. We should check again. So there's this, there's a lot of that, or hang on, this is coming from a bad IP? We should really check that as well. So we're doing a lot of work. Both B2B and B2X, it's across the board, as we've seen with a lot of the security issues of late and breaches, etc. That's a really prevalent thing that we're doubling down on with our customers and getting a lot of feedback. The other thing that's really quite fine, is around fine-grained authorisation. It's a very technical topic. But if you think about the Australian Open, and that referee that just needs to do this little thing versus the person that's raising the structure for the stadium, etc, they've got different requirements, different authorisations for supporting those permissions, as well is a new product that we're currently in beta, releasing as well - that's been driven by a lot of customer demand as well. So super exciting there. Alex: Now, I just want to finish on a couple of questions. I know we haven't got much time left. But could each of you please share a memory of the first computer that you remember owning? James: All right, okay. This is going back a little while, isn't it? It was an Epson. It was a 286. Back in the days when everything was x86, and it had a 20 meg hard drive, which was enormous, was vast, because there was no way that you're ever going to use all of that. 640K memory. And I think it was an amber monochrome screen. And it was amazing. It was the fanciest thing on the market. Alex: James: Richard: I've had a very, very memorable Vic 20. If anybody remembers the Vic 20, it was a precursor to the Commodore 64. And, back in the day when you used to buy a computer magazine and punch in BASIC code to compile a program. And then if you wanted to save it, you'd recorded it on a cassette. So the Vic 20 - that's where I learned programming and BASIC, way back when, but very affectionate, very, very distraught when I had to throw that thing out, by the way, so yeah. James: You've just uncovered a distant memory for me there, Richard. Before the Epson, there was the TRS-80. In those days, yeah, forgot about that one. The cassette, the reference to the cassette is what triggered that one. Yeah. Richard: Alex: They used to call the TRS-80 the "Trash 80". That was from the people who bought something else, like the Exidy Sorcerer, or something else. Now, my second last question, and I'll start with you, Richard, and then go to you, James - can you please share some of the best advice you've received in life to help you get where you are today? Richard: Oh, I'd have to give it to my dad. He told me not to work my hands and to work my head. That was his advice. I don't think I'm great with my hands. So I think he gave me good advice, for me, that was the best advice that I had, so really double down on investing in myself, and knowledge doesn't take up any space. I'm on this continual journey to continue to develop myself and learn. So I'd say that's probably my best advice I've had. Alex: James: I think I should take that advice as well - I like that! For me, it would be just pick one thing and be good at that one thing. So, depending on the scenario or the circumstances, it can be a career, or it can be skills within a career. But in any situation, just what's that one thing that you need to do well, what to do right. And just focus on that one. Alex: We've only got like a minute left. But to each of you, what is your final message to iTWire viewers and readers and to your current, and future customers and partners, and again, we'll start with you, Richard. Richard: Probably take a page out of James's book, and don't build identity - focus on your core, to give it a plug. That's my view. James? James: So you don't have to solve everything on your own. So you don't need to build everything yourself, you don't need to devote your entire team to every possible problem, you can find business partners who will help you. For us, Xero, Okta, there was a slingshot effect for us that saved us a lot of work. So, it's good. Richard: Alex: Well, Richard Marr, General Manager, Digital Native Business, APJ at Okta, and James Simpson, CTO at SafetyCulture - thank you very much for your time. I wish you the best of success and I do hope we can speak again in the future! Richard: James: