Okta, a provider of on-demand identity and access management service, announced it has published a rating system for companies adopting software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) applications, as well as guidance to help developers create manageable solutions for their customers.

The Okta Scale rates each SaaS application based on its ability to meet enterprise identity management needs. With the rating system, enterprise IT teams will be able to assess the overall manageability of hosted Exchange cloud applications.

Okta's developer guidance provides SaaS Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with the actionable steps to address customer identity management requirements in their mission critical applications.

“With the Okta Scale we can now more clearly answer the questions our customers and prospects pose about which apps have what capability and the developer guidance formalizes the dialogue we have been having with many of our ISV partners to ensure that jointly we can enable enterprise IT to run more secure and manageable Cloud Services Networks,” said Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta.  

Enterprises are looking for SaaS applications to power business processes and contain sensitive company data. The lack of support for integrating with a centralized identity management solution in applications can slow down their adoption across the company. It can also create security risks for enterprises if unauthorized users are able to gain access to the applications and data.

“The Okta Scale gives us greater visibility into what is possible as we select new cloud applications and our strategy is to work across all of our vendors to achieve deep integration with Okta that is aligned with their ISV Guidance. The result for Drobo will be a dramatic increase in security and manageability across our cloud applications,” said Tom Ta, director of IT, Drobo, in a statement.

Okta developed the Okta Scale and the related ISV Guidance based on engagements with customers around identity management. Okta will release a set of metrics that measure hosted Exchange cloud application manageability on a scale of 0 to 8. In this first release, the scale ranges

Recently, Okta announced it is entering into the hosted Exchange cloud computing arena with the launch of its enterprise platform for cloud application identity and access management. The platform is aimed at medium-sized businesses running third-party hosted Exchange cloud applications.