With cyberattacks against the enterprise continuing to increase both in sophistication and frequency, traditional authorization functionality is no longer sufficient to protect employee-owned devices. Box Inc. is expanding its partnership with Okta Inc. this morning to help organizations that rely on its collaboration platform bolster their defenses and regulate mobile access to internal data more effectively.

Starting from next week, the latter’s namesake security service will provide the ability to prevent a worker from logging into their company’s file sharing environment if certain conditions are not met. Administrators will be able to have Okta automatically deny access attempts from an mobile devices that have not been whitelisted by the IT department, or only make an employee’s Box client usable within the specific geographic area where they reside. The more sensitive the data kept in a file sharing environment is, the more restrictions may be imposed.

Okta’s access control policies can be centrally managed through a cloud-based console that makes it possible to quickly perform adjustments when a new threat emerges or operational demands change. The functionality saves administrators the trouble of individually applying new rules to every single employee-owned device, which potentially amounts to a lot of time at a large organization, and avoids the risk at some end-points getting overlooked in the same stroke. The resulting improvement in the reliability of security enforcement enables organizations to do away with the need for employees to input their login credentials into Box every time they need to pull up a document.

According to Okta, the file sharing service can be accessed in just two taps using its single sign-on feature. The integration will enable the company to better target the over 35,000 organizations that use Box to store internal files, while helping the collaboration giant make its platform more appealing to government agencies and other security-conscious buyers.

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