Cybersecurity provider Okta Inc. today announced that it’s enhancing its flagship solution to address the needs of major e-commerce websites and enterprise applications required to handle massive volumes of traffic.

Okta provides a platform called Identity Cloud that helps companies manage who accesses their systems. It authenticates users when they try to log in, restricts what application features they may access and provides other capabilities such as single sign-on across multiple services.

Today’s update, DynamicScale, beefs up Identity Cloud’s tent pole authentication tool, which Okta provides as an application programming interface. The company claims has made “infrastructure automation and intelligence” improvements behind the scenes to let the tool handle 500,000 authentication requests per minute, which allows it to match Salesforce.com Inc.’s entire daily API request limit after 120 seconds. 

Okta said DynamicScale will come handy in a range of scenarios. Online retailers, for instance, can employ it to secure user logins during the holiday season traffic spike. Companies in other industries could harness DynamicScale to handle short-term surges of user interest after events such as product launches and viral marketing campaigns.

The increased API capacity is also useful for developers. As part of the update, Okta is releasing performance testing tools that will enable software teams to see how well their applications handle periods of high demand by subjecting them to up to 1,000 times the number of authentication requests they normally process.

The announcement of DynamicScale follows Okta’s introduction of an infrastructure security solution called Advanced Server Access. The offering, which is based on technology the company obtained through a 2018 startup acquisition, allows enterprises to manage access to their servers centrally. Okta this year also introduced Access Gateway, a service that makes its platform’s authentication features available for applications running on on-premises hardware. 

Photo: Okta