The Oktane Awards reflect on the impressive work Okta customers have done over the past year. They recognize the brilliant and forward-thinking individuals who equip their organizations with the right technologies to drive innovative solutions to today’s toughest business challenges.
There are nine total awards, spread across the following categories: Cloud Conqueror, Evangelist, Protector, Lightning Deployment, Customer Experience Expert, Change Maker, Business Value Driver, Okta For Good, and Developer. In total, thirty-three finalists were selected across all categories. LiveRamp was selected as a finalist for the Cloud Conqueror award; pit against four other companies for the title.
The Cloud Conqueror award focuses on organizations who have made significant moves toward a cloud-first environment after experiencing the growth and agility limitations of their existing on-prem systems. The winner of this award is someone who is constantly advocating for new technologies that increase productivity, enhance security, and reduce costs for their organization.
For consideration as a Cloud Conqueror finalist, each nominee was asked to create a one-slide overview showcasing how it’s modernizing infrastructure by moving to the cloud, consolidating user directories, leveraging modern standards-based protocols such as OIDC and OAuth, and architecting for scale with microservices.
Josh Kwan, Engineering Lead for DevOps, led the charge for LiveRamp. Josh was nominated by Pablo Valarezo, Corporate Infrastructure Manager for LiveRamp. Pablo architected LiveRamp’s Okta integration during its inception, and now is in charge of ongoing management, among other responsibilities.
Josh Kwan submitted the following for consideration:
| LiveRamp |
Cloud Conqueror Finalist | Joshua Kwan |
Okta |
| Best of breed technologies
Josh’s DevOps team adopts technologies which help meet ideals such as: buy, don’t build; promote single sources of truth; eliminate engineering toil. To get there we leveraged Google Cloud Platform, Okta, and Terraform. Legacy barriers LR’s major legacy asset was a Colo consisting of 2,500+ Linux servers with access federated by a on-prem VPN and LDAP authentication. It was fully migrated to GCP by November 2019 after 16 months of migration work. Developing best practices to migrate to cloud while staying secure, reliable, on-time, and within budget was our toughest challenge. In parallel, we were still responsible for making sure Colo did not go down. Utilizing Okta We are most proud of our eng_meta GitOps flow which authoritatively manages our engineering team structures (different from Workday structure) within Okta. All access to SAML apps and production is done via groups that are populated from eng_meta, facilitating on- and off-boarding and enforcing separation of duties. A single pull request by a manager now gives a new hire identical access to their team. |
90,000 cores and 30+ PB migrated 50% reduced Day1 time to productivity 130+ staff changes in 8 months Workforce Products ● AMFA ● Single Sign-On ● Universal Directory ● Lifecycle ManagementCustomer Products ● Core Platform ● Lifecycle Management ● Single Sign-On |
Okta customers, partners, and employees were then directed to the Okta Awards website to vote on the finalists for each category based on the slide they submitted. Okta reported that over 3000 people visited the Okta Awards website to vote during the two-week timeframe.
At the virtual awards ceremony, held on April 1st, 2020 during Oktane20, Okta’s SVP of Customer First, Eric Kelleher announced that Josh Kwan and LiveRamp were selected as the winner of the Cloud Conqueror award. Please congratulate Josh and the entire LiveRamp team for winning this year’s award. You can read more about the Oktane Awards and the other winners in Okta’s blog post.