Company information is a double-edged sword. Workers need access to internal processes, data, and other sensitive records to do their jobs—but in the wrong hands, this information can bring a business to its knees.
In the US, the average cost of a data breach reached $8.64 million in 2020. Not only is that price tag the highest in the world, a majority of IT professionals believe the rise of remote work makes breaches costlier and more difficult to identify and contain.
Even before the coronavirus forced many workers to essentially take their offices home (along with all of the sensitive information therein), cybersecurity risks made identity and access management a top priority for businesses. But as any IT professional will tell you, the work associated with provisioning and ensuring secure access to necessary apps for all employees can be a time suck—which is where solutions such as Okta come in.
Classified as “identity as a service” (IDaaS) software, Okta streamlines the acts of onboarding and providing access to tech solutions for employees by allowing business to manage these necessities via a single platform. When a new employee is hired, Okta reduces the time spent on provisioning by automating actions such as creating new user accounts for all of the business apps in use. But before you can realize the benefits at the employee level, you first need to set up all of your compatible business applications on Okta—and that can take time too.
With RingCentral for Okta, it’s easy to get started. Here are five ways this integration can make it easier and faster to onboard new employees and get them set up for secure communications.
1. Automatic provisioning for new employees
Delays to getting new employees up and running can be costly. Not only do you have to pay your IT and HR staff for the hours it can take to set up new accounts on all your apps, but the longer it takes to get your new hire started, the longer it will be before they become productive and start earning your business money. RingCentral for Okta helps to cut some of the manual tasks of getting a new employee fully equipped to do their job. As soon as you create a new entry for your hire in your HR or Active Directory, they’ll automatically be assigned a RingCentral phone number they can start using right away.
2. Apply your company’s security protocol
Whether it’s multifactor authentication or specific password rules, your business may have its own unique access requirements designed to keep information secure. Okta allows businesses to extend their access requirements across all the apps employees use. Integrating RingCentral and Okta allows you to seamlessly extend the same security standards you’ve employed for your organization to your communications tools too.
3. One-time authentication
Ensuring the security of each application in use within your business is crucial to protecting your interests. But having to remember a million passwords is a headache for employees, and it can prevent quick access to information and stand in the way of people doing their best work. Single Sign-on allows employees to access all of their Okta-integrated apps, including RingCentral, more easily. Instead of having to remember different passwords for each app they use, employees can log on one time to access all their services—including RingCentral audio and video calling and SMS.
4. Up-to-date employee info—everywhere
Ensuring seamless contact between employees is important for everyday collaboration. It’s especially so in an emergency when workers must quickly connect in order to work with each other to resolve a problem. That’s easy if you can walk down a hall to someone’s desk, but less so for teams working apart. Having to locate contact details, such as a phone number, can waste precious time—especially if employee records are not up to date. With RingCentral for Okta, any updates to an employee’s RingCentral phone number or extension automatically populate in your HR and Active Directories and other apps, putting an end to out-of-date and conflicting contact details.
5. Enable employees to work securely—from anywhere
One employee, one phone number. Seems like a simple strategy for making it easy to get in touch with coworkers. But when people work remotely, or from the road, the necessity of mobile phones and home office numbers can make that simplicity elusive. With RingCentral for Okta, you can automatically deploy RingCentral to users’ mobile devices—so they can securely make and receive calls from a single number, wherever work takes them.
Securely set up new employees faster
Onboarding new employees is an important—though not obviously rewarding—task. While it can be a time-sucking slog to set up a new hire on each and every tech tool you’re using, a failure to do so can be a security risk and impede your hire’s ability to hit the ground running.
RingCentral for Okta automates the work of connecting employees with powerful communications tools, helping them get set up faster and ensuring uniform security.
Learn more about RingCentral for Okta here.
Originally published Aug 18, 2020, updated Jan 18, 2023
