Cloud identity management firm Okta Inc. is building on the launch of its revamped developer experience earlier this week with the planned release of new products that will help it significantly expand its market opportunity.

It’s also partnering with the content delivery provider Fastly Inc. to help that company protect users against “Layer 7 threats” such as account takeovers and API abuse.

The new tools announced today include a Privileged Access Management offering that will be used by companies to secure their most critical information technology infrastructure. It’s also planning to release a new Identity Governance Administration tool that will enable self-service identity governance within larger organizations.

Okta, which announced the tools during its virtual Oktane21 user conference, said they should increase its total addressable market from $55 billion to $80 billion. The company currently provides tools aimed at the workforce identity and customer identity markets.

Okta said it sees a big opportunity for growth in the PAM and IGA sectors. It argues that existing tools for identity management are ill-suited to the complex cloud environments most organizations rely on, and that they will need something that’s more tailored for that purpose. Traditional privileged access management solutions are too brittle to adapt to the constantly changing resource and user types in cloud-based DevOps organizations, the company said.

The new Privileged Access offering gets around that by combining “least privilege access requirements” with its identity controls to help companies strengthen their zero-trust security posture, the company said. It enables companies to apply fine-grained user- and role-based security policies from a central system so they can manage who has access to what at an infrastructure level. It also helps boost compliance by tying session logins to specific users.

Okta did already provide Advanced Server Access controls with its main Workforce Identity platform, but Okta Privileged Access adds support for databases, containers and appliances.

The Okta Identity Governance tool, meanwhile, provides self-service identity governance and administration through a single platform for all users within an extended enterprise.

The company reckons that traditional IGA systems are geared toward on-premises infrastructure rather than the disparate applications hosted on multiple clouds that many organizations are using today. OIG requires end-users to request access to key applications through popular workplaces tools such as Slack. Authorized users will automatically be granted access based on certain attributes, with access suspended when a user status changes in the company’s HR systems, Okta said.

“With identity at the core, we can offer the most intelligent and efficient path to securing user access and mitigating risk for all users, applications and data,” said Okta Chief Product Officer Diya Jolly. “Okta Identity Governance cuts across all resources from APIs and applications to servers, analyzes the right level of access to critical resources, and ensures that access stays in line over time.”

The new tools will be some time coming, though: General availability is planned for the first quarter of 2022.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said that expanding its identity management offerings to the PAM and IGA markets makes sense for Okta.

“Privileged access management is needed to enable zero trust in the enterprise world, and identity governance is equally important for companies that work in multicloud and hybrid cloud worlds,” Mueller said. “They need to give their users fast and reliable access to enable enterprise acceleration, without them running into any issues. Market expansion means a big investment is needed though, and that takes time. The only disappointment is that Okta will only be able to bring its new tools to market next year.”

The integration with Fastly, at least, will happen much sooner. Okta said it’s combining its identity management tools with Fastly’s Signal Sciences portfolio as of today to provide more effective consumer identity protection than either platform can provide alone.

Fastly provides a content delivery network that helps websites and cloud services load faster. It said that by combining Okta with its Signal Sciences tools that protect against hacking it can provide a single source of truth for users’ risk of having their identity stolen by hackers. It will also help block accounts that have been taken over as soon as that occurs, while also providing a shield against future attacks.

Today’s updates follow the launch of Okta’s new Starter Developer Edition platform that gives software developers a way to embed the company’s authentication, authorization and user management tools into enterprise cloud applications at scale.

Photo: Okta/Facebook