Building a Well Managed Cloud Application

A Well Managed Cloud Application
When considering what it means to be a well-managed application, ISVs should think about end- users, IT, Business Administrators, and Business leaders.

Ease of use is essential for users when accessing any resources or applications. IT has to strike a balance between ease of use and security. A well-defined identity infrastructure is important. But just as important is the ability for each application to integrate with this infrastructure and with other applications.

End-users do not want to remember different passwords for different systems. The ability to single sign-on with a single set of credentials eliminates password fatigue and reduces extra overhead of unnecessary help desk calls for password resets.

Customers also care about usage, productivity, and ROI. They want to know their users are getting access to the application when they need it, that the application is improving their competitiveness, and that they are getting a great return on their investment.

Externalizing user management capabilities via APIs enables IT administrators to efficiently set up application accounts for their end-users. It also improves security by allowing customers to centrally manage application access and disable access in a timely fashion.

Capturing application usage and account information helps customers to understand how the applications are being used across the board. Providing auditable and detailed reporting on user activities and permissions is important in satisfying customer compliance initiatives.

Okta strongly encourages ISVs to implement these features to help improve manageability of your application. These are also some of the key criteria identified by many customers and they are reflected in our Okta scale. The more criteria satisfied by your application, the higher the Okta ranking will be for your application.

Customers can use the scale when they are evaluating new cloud applications they want to adopt, and ISVs can use the scale to help ensure their applications continue to meet market demand.

Whether or not your customer is working with Okta, these features will guarantee better end-user and IT adoption by allowing tighter integration with your customers’ existing IT infrastructure - a major criterion to deployment success of any cloud application.