Smartphones and tablets have helped enterprise workers become a lot more productive when away from the office, but the sheer number of end-points used to access the corporate network at any given time makes it difficult for administrators to track who’s trying to access what effectively. That’s the challenge Okta Inc. hopes to alleviate with its new multi-factor authentication service.

It’s an expansion upon its existing mobile authorization platform, which serves over 2,500 companies and has attracted $230 million in funding to date, that adds much-needed automation to the previously largely manual  controls. The functionality is exposed to customers in the form of an automated profiler that can make certain decisions on how to handle logins requests all by itself.

To minimize the inconvenience for users, the engine only fires up when a sign-in attempt is explicitly flagged as suspicious by its behavior analytics algorithms, which are fed large volumes of historical usage data collected from Okta’s install base to ensure accuracy. Upon identifying potential abuse, the service determines and the executes the most appropriate response to the situation.

If, for instance, a computer in a foreign country tries to access an application behind the corporate firewall with credentials belonging to a U.S.-based worker, Okta will send an alert to that worker’s mobile device in order to check whether it’s they who made the request. And the scrutiny doesn’t stop at the login screen, with automatic session timeouts protecting against device theft.

Customers can choose from a broad selection of secondary authentication tools to use in their deployments, which has also been augmented as part of the update with the addition of support for the Yubikey, a pre-configured USB key that serves as a physical access credential. The integration is available immediately as part of the new service.

Photo via Geralt