Okta has hosted a user conference every year since 2013… even during Covid, they hosted Oktane online… and this year the conference was held in Las Vegas, Nevada. At least one person from Thoughtworks has attended every single one, from the very beginning… a proud tradition I was happy to uphold!
As we all know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so I’m not sure why that’s where all the Tech conferences happen… as it means surely I’m not allowed to write this blog post at all. Hopefully the Vegas blog police aren’t watching…
But wait a second, how come you were allowed out of your basement office in the first place? Why were you at Oktane 2024? Well…
Two colleagues strongly encouraged me to submit a talk idea for Oktane 2024, something I’d tried last year with no success. But if at first you don’t succeed…
This year I pitched a talk idea about how transformational the trust signals we’ll be receiving via Okta Verify for Desktop will be… and how (ironically - with a job title of Mac Wrangler) the biggest difference it would make for us, is on the Windows side, a platform where our management tooling is… entirely OK, but the API is lacking, making visibility of devices a challenge.
Much to my shock and surprise, Okta actually took me up on the offer. I wasn’t offered an individual speaker session, but was asked to join a panel discussion with fellow Okta customer Booking.com about our “adventures in Fastpass” - talking more broadly about Okta Verify for Desktop and Okta’s Fastpass (passwordless) initiative.
Being a speaker at Oktane is a big deal. Not only do you get a free ticket to the conference and accommodation provided by Okta, but it also means a great deal to our customer success team - some of whom I was able to meet at the conference in person for the first time. Not only that - I also had a “speaker” logo on my badge… and I even got access to an exclusive speaker lounge, where I could sit and drink coffee and work on my imposter syndrome in peace…
Because, not only are Okta hoping it’ll be a great session, but it also means representing Thoughtworks (and Global IT Services) to the wider Okta community of techies and customers.
So no pressure then.
I’ve attended (and even spoken at) conferences in the past - but generally with a Mac admin focus. And none of those events prepared me for the scale of Oktane. The venue, Caesar’s Forum, easily swallowed 6000+ global attendees… and it felt like wherever you looked as you wandered from hotel to hotel (as everything in Vegas seems to be interconnected somehow) there was someone with an Oktane conference pass on display.
We were presenting on the second day of the conference, but had time for a rehearsal the day before… which rather than calming my nerves, probably made me more nervous, as the room we were in felt enormous, and we ran out of time to run through everything. So it would have to be alright on the night…
Spoiler: Yes it was a “Fireside chat” but myself, Jurgen, Joe and Vish had been hard at work on the content in the weeks running up to the conference. Bouncing ideas back and forth via a Google Doc, and practising and refining the “script” on weekly Zoom calls to ensure we covered all the things that we felt were important.
Booking.com is a lot further in their Okta Verify deployment journey than we are, and there’s lots we can learn from their experience… However, it allowed me to focus on where we are, with deployment of Okta Verify to our fleet of Mac laptops, and our future goals for Verify and Fastpass.
When it came time for the presentation, the room was looking very full indeed. We learned afterwards we’d had over 300 people attend our session, which made it the third most popular breakout session at the entire conference!
And you can watch it here:
I’m also proud to say the time put into learning our script and rehearsing together really paid off. We had no safety net, no speaker notes on the screens in front of us, and I think that confidence with our material showed. (And yes, I couldn’t help but notice that speakers in other sessions were glancing down at their speaker notes!)
And on the subject of other sessions… With my team’s focus on device management and device assurance, there were some really interesting announcements. Improved device assurance via Okta verify was hinted at during our session - but is covered more fully here:
The plan is to include OSQuery, an open source stack designed to supercharge endpoint visibility, as part of Okta Verify - allowing admins to write a wide range of custom compliance checks before allowing access to apps protected by Okta. A massive step forward compared to the current range of compliance signals available.
I’m incredibly excited by the possibilities this will open up in future, especially when it comes to BYOD laptops, phones and tablets.
See the screenshot below of the kind of trust signals we can work with today. OSQuery is going to be a game changer here!
Currently the experience of being blocked if a device isn’t compliant, isn’t a very user friendly one… which is one of many reasons why Okta device assurance is yet to make the leap from our test environment into prod… (but soon…) However, the ability to provide folks with both a grace period to remediate device compliance issues, as well as documentation and guides to help them remediate were features announced in Karthig’s session.
Turns out that Grace Periods and remediation guides are already available in Okta as Early Access features! So time to get testing then!
Todd’s keynote was fun - as he announced Okta’s move from being not just an Identity company to being a security company too… and with that in mind, the announcement of a new open standard to help secure cloud apps - IPSIE - which all sounds positive and exciting, but I couldn’t help but think of this xkcd cartoon…
(sorry Todd)
Michael J Fox’s keynote was inspirational too. He’s smart, funny and continues to make a massive impact on the world, as he works to improve visibility and understanding of Parkinson’s disease. An unexpected highlight, in the midst of all the talk about technology.
In fact there were all kinds of amazing sessions - all of which are available on demand here:
Despite (or because of) being physically at the conference, I still have sessions to catch up on! Because of course, the biggest benefit to being at a conference is the “hallway track” - the chance to speak to other customers, and directly with Okta product engineers. I had some fantastic conversations with engineers on the Okta Verify for Desktop team, as well as with folks involved in Okta Workflows.
I even got to spend almost five minutes with our CISO. In real life. This is the kind of thing that never happens these days…
Last but not least… feedback.
The Okta team were thrilled with how smoothly our session went. On a call with our Okta CSM yesterday, she was full of praise for our contribution to the session, and Oktane in general, and has been sharing the session far and wide, with lots of her other customers. So there may be follow up calls where we can share what we’ve learned with other Okta customers.
Hearing things like this make the travel, the prep, and the jetlag (at both ends of the travel) just about worth it. Here’s to the next one!