Okta's Advanced Server Access Bolsters Zoom's Security Amid Rapid Growth

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Zoom Video Communications, Inc., a leading enterprise video communications platform, experienced significant growth during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This rapid expansion required a scalable and secure identity solution that would also provide a seamless user experience. Zoom's legacy identity management environment was not equipped to scale easily with the public cloud or to the hundreds of thousands of systems in use. The company needed a solution that could handle the immense growth while maintaining security and compliance standards. The challenge was to find a solution that could secure server access, alleviate the pressure on Zoom's data center operations team, and provide a seamless user experience to the millions of customers who rely on Zoom for work, education, and personal use.

Zoom Video Communications, Inc. is a leading enterprise video communications platform that has become synonymous with virtual meetings, lectures, and events of all sizes. Founded in 2011, Zoom is publicly traded (NASDAQ:ZM) and headquartered in San Jose, California. The company's mission is to empower people to do more, whether it's bankers helping their clients, professional services helping their clients, or medical practitioners helping their patients. Zoom aims to make a virtual experience as good as, if not better than, the in-person event. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom experienced significant growth as companies shifted to remote work, becoming a household name.

Zoom turned to Okta, a company with which it had previously implemented workforce solutions for employee authentication. Okta's Advanced Server Access (ASA) was deployed across thousands of servers in a single day, without service interruption, thanks to Okta’s easy integrations and automation capabilities. Okta ASA provided added security, seamless user access, and simplified privileged management at scale to Zoom’s production and staging servers. Okta integrated seamlessly with Zoom’s existing Ansible framework, enabling the automation required to scale quickly. Zoom also explored Okta Workflows and other automations through the Okta platform, which unlocked a number of additional use cases. For example, if a user is locked out of Okta, an automated notification is sent to system administrators to help address the issue.

• The implementation of Okta ASA provided Zoom with better visibility into who is using which servers and how, making compliance simpler and better. It also allowed Zoom to automate tasks, freeing up engineers to focus on more strategic tasks. The security teams or the compliance teams can now easily access information about what servers people have access to and how they can access them. The number of things Zoom has to worry about for SSH keys is zero, as Okta deals with all of it, with very little change. This has substantially simplified Zoom's compliance process and made life easier for the data center operations team. The reliability of Okta enabled the Zoom IT team to eventually stabilize and then reduce their workload, so they could turn their attention to more strategic aspects of their jobs.

• Okta ASA was deployed in a single day across thousands of servers.

• Zoom expanded its investment in Okta ASA significantly later in 2020.

• Every new admin onboarded at Zoom is now automatically assigned to the correct roles, which can include up to 450 separate group admin roles.