The competition in the API management market is increasing rapidly as more vendors move to capitalize on the estimated 400 percent growth that the segment is expected to see by 2020. The latest entrant is Okta Inc., which is rolling out a new version of its popular identity management platform that promises to help organizations regulate how their services are used more effectively.

Okta API Access Management makes it possible to control what parts of an application are available to users using high-level policies that can be customized based on the specific operational requirements at hand. If, for instance, a system containing confidential data is connected to a set of department-specific mobile apps, then administrators are able to ensure that the sensitive records are only viewable in units that have the appropriate permissions. And if the information is especially sensitive, then access rights can be limited even further to only certain employees within the approved teams.

Okta’s new service also provides the ability to take more technical factors into account such as the device from which a user logs into a service, their location and their activity history. The vendor says that the functionality can be useful both for regulating API usage both within a company’s internal workforce and among external parties like vendors, partners and clients that access its systems from outside the firewall. Keeping tabs on the latter group is especially important due to the elevated risk that comes with exposing internal services to the outside world. Yet as important as it is, security is only one of the priorities that organizations must address when building their application interfaces.

Instead of trying to tackle every requirement on the checklist on its own and go up against better-established API automation providers, Okta has decided to simply integrate its service with third party management platforms. Its new service is only compatible Apigee and Mulesoft on launch, but the vendor will likely add support rot for other solutions over time. And Okta is also continuing to make improvements to its core general-purpose identity management offering.

The company is rolling out a new provisioning feature for the service in conjunction with the launch of Okta API Access Management that makes it possible to have an employee’s access permissions automatically updated if they switch positions. Additionally, Okta announced this week that it has been selected by Google to become the “preferred”  identity management partner for its cloud business. The landmark deal has the potential to make a significant impact on the outfit’s s bottom line given the size of the Alphabet Inc. ecosystem.

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