Salesforce Inc. and Okta Inc. today announced a new partnership to help businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The partnership calls for a new integration between the Okta Identity Cloud and Salesforce Work.com that’s intended to help organizations and communities to build trust with both employees and customers. Designed to help businesses and organizations around the world reopen safely, the partnership allows organizations to deploy Work.com quickly with security and protection for those solutions regardless of location.

Salesforce’s Work.com was launched in May, offering new technology solutions and resources to help business and community leaders around the world reopen safely, reskill employees and respond efficiently on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Work.com includes employee wellness assessment, shift management, contact tracing, emergency response management, and grants and volunteer management. The partnership with the Okta Identity Cloud is designed to make it easier for Salesforce subscribers to give employees and vendors access to multiple systems that previously were not seamlessly integrated.

Leveraging their existing identity providers or corporate directories such as Active Directory, under the partnership Salesforce customers can enable employees to sign-in to Work.com with a single click. Information technology administrators can now synchronize data from human resources systems, such as Workday, to create users automatically in Work.com, helping organizations quickly and securely deploy Work.com while reducing the effort required to supervise the process.

On the security side, the partnership is said to protect sensitive data by enforcing tighter controls. In allowing the easy provision and deprovision of users, the partnership establishes fine-grained controls for permissions and enforces multi-factor authentication for specific users or groups with potential access to sensitive data in Work.com.

“The new normal demands a new way to work and as technology companies, it’s our job to reduce as much friction as possible for companies so they can treat their employees like valued customers,” Sarah Franklin, executive vice president and general manager for Platform, Trailhead and AppExchange at Salesforce, said in a statement. “Together, we’ll increase IT productivity and provide employees with a seamless experience.”

Salesforce has faced its own issues during the pandemic. The company laid off 1,000 employees in August. Officially the layoffs were “reallocating resources to position the company for continued growth,” including “continuing to hire and redirecting some employees to fuel our strategic areas, and eliminating some positions that no longer map to our business priorities.”

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