Okta Inc. today unveiled new features designed to help companies better control who accesses their technology infrastructure.

The first set of capabilities that the identity management giant introduced at its annual customer event in Las Vegas is aimed at easing the task of managing users who hail from outside the organization. At a typical enterprise, this group consists mainly of customers, contractors and representatives of partner companies.

Okta’s Lifecycle Management tool now lets administrators create a self-service registration workflow for onboarding such users. As a result, the time they normally spend on manually creating new accounts can be freed up for more important tasks. The feature complements the service’s automated offboarding tool, which makes it possible to quickly revoke a user’s permissions once they longer require access to company assets.

Often, account suspensions are also performed as part of periodical audits known as access recertifications that aim to ensure every user’s information is in order. It’s a particularly big priority for companies in highly regulated industries such finance. To streamline the process, Okta has upgraded Lifecycle Management with new controls that enable administrators to confirm account details via email and set time-based limits.

Completing the rollout is an update to the Okta Universal Directory, the service that the company provides for managing those account details. The enhancement brings support for the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol or LDAP protocol commonly used to implement authentication in on-premises workloads.

Thanks to the addition, Okta said, Universal Directory can now work with 98 percent of the applications managed by information technology departments. That’s on top of the existing support for mobile and cloud services. The service’s new ability to manage user access across all the workloads in a company should help boost its appeal, especially since rivals such as OneLogin Inc. have already been offering LDAP support.

The competition in the identity management segment is intense. Okta is facing off against players large and small, the newest of which entered the fray only a few days ago. Palo Alto-based ShoCard Inc. last week announced that it has raised $4 million in funding for a service that uses blockchain technology to help companies manage user credentials. 

Image: Okta