LMI was able to implement their hybrid cloud strategy with the use of Okta and ICSynergy’s SPGateway. This implementation improved LMI’s bottom line by lowering risk and increasing employee productivity.

Introduction

LMI is an independent nonprofit that focuses on a simple yet vital mission: Providing high-quality logistics solutions for government agencies. Founded in 1961, LMI was directed by President John F. Kennedy “to bring the best minds to bear on solving our government’s most complex logistics management problems.”

With such an important mission, LMI has a critical requirement for IT solutions that work seamlessly and reliably. LMI needed a way to integrate Okta (their web authentication solution) with QlikView to enable their employees to access this application. Okta directed them to their preferred solution – ICSynergy’s SPGateway.

Seamless IDP Integration

Okta is the gold standard for providing secure authentication including Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. They are able to connect to thousands of applications because most SaaS applications implement the SAML standard.

However, most on-premises applications such as QlikView, Oracle E-Business Suite, or Microsoft SharePoint do not natively support SAML. Furthermore, organizations cannot risk having SAML sessions hijacked and enabling the malicious actors’ access to their systems.

Okta instructed LMI to contact their preferred solution vendor for connecting Okta to on-premises applications – ICSynergy. ICSynergy has more than 19 years of experience in identity and access management, and is an expert in deploying Okta.

As a result of their IAM and Okta experience, ICSynergy has developed a product to enable organizations to solve the hybrid cloud access management challenge. This product is named the SPGateway. LMI purchased the SPGateway and hired ICSynergy to deploy into production.

Seamless Access + Complete Flexibility

ICSynergy used their best practices to deploy the SPGateway to connect Okta to QlikView. During the deployment, LMI discovered they had another on-premises application that needed to be connected to Okta.

This application was Microsoft SharePoint. While many organizations have migrated to SharePoint’s cloud version, LMI still used the on-premises version. The version used by LMI only allowed Windows Native Authentication for authentication.

To overcome this challenge, the SPGateway was configured to translate Okta SAML tokens into Windows Native Authentication tokens. This allowed employees to connect to SharePoint via Okta.

The SPGateway solution represented a perfect fit for LMI’s needs. It enabled one-click access to any web application for LMI employees including on-premises applications like QlikView and Microsoft SharePoint.

Lowered Risk

The SPGateway approach offers another clear advantage compared to pure Okta authentication – support for multiple authentication sources.

For example, if LMI were to lose access to Okta, the SPGateway can fall back to using Active Directory as an authentication source. Thus employees could still access applications protected by the SPGateway.  

Learn More Online

With more than 300 customers and 20 years of industry experience, ICSynergy is a recognized leader in Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions. To learn more about how ICSynergy can solve your toughest IAM challenges, visit us online at www.ICSynergy.com.