As business users continue to shift more and more of their work to mobile devices, Okta Inc. is taking an unexpected turn against the flow and extending its popular authentication service to the workstations that have dominated traditional office life. The new support for Windows and Macs is accompanied by the addition of interoperability with applications running under Android’s remotely managed mode.

The upgrades were announced at Okta’s third annual customer conference this morning, which also saw the introduction of management capabilities to help administrators balance the requirements of all the different devices connected to the corporate network. Access restrictions can now be applied retrospectively to existing user profiles based on attributes such as the division or team to which a particular employee belongs and their seniority.

The startup sees that capability used in tandem with the improved reporting functionality that is also being made available for its service at the event. The combination of the two enables administrators to quickly compare the security settings in a new application with their Okta configurations and adjust user policies where needed to bring compliance enforcement up to par. That’s a potentially major boon in large organizations that employ upwards of hundreds of different cloud services.

But even the most streamlined management mechanism can’t guarantee perfect enforcement in such environments , where there are so many devices to manage that mistakes become inevitable. That’s why Okta is also rolling out a new access request feature that allows users to directly ask their superiors for the ability to use an application without having to place a helpdesk ticket.  The addition kills two birds with one stone, reducing the ensuing wait while freeing up administrators to focus on more important tasks than tweaking out log-in permissions.

The startup hopes that the new capabilities will help its service compete more effectively against rivals such as OneLogin Inc. and Ping Identity Corp. that have also been investing heavily in feature development. The $75 million in funding that Okta raised a couple of months ago should certainly help that effort along.

Image via Okta