Okta Inc., a provider of identity management services that help enterprises control who accesses their systems, today announced that it has acquired security startup ScaleFT Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

The San Francisco-based startup offers a platform for implementing so-called “zero trust” security. It’s an emerging approach to protecting infrastructure that may receive a significant boost now that ScaleFT is joining Okta, one of the industry’s leading identity management providers.

Much of the credit for the recent interest in zero trust security goes to Google LLC. In 2014, the company launched an initiative called BeyondCorp that proposed a new approach to access control in the enterprise. The project is based on a security model that Google implemented internally following a 2010 cyberattack.

At a high level, BeyondCorp-inspired solutions such as ScaleFT’s platform aim to adapt how access control is managed to the growing fragmentation of corporate networks. Thanks to the rise of mobile devices, workers today access business applications not only from the workstations in their office but also remote locations. Moreover, many of those applications now reside beyond the company’s firewall in the cloud.

Zero trust security enables companies to apply access policies to devices and users rather than their increasingly splintered networks. ScaleFT has implemented this approach in the form of a cloud-based service. According to the startup’s website, the offering fine-tunes the authorization workflow based on the context of each access request.

ScaleFT takes into account various user attributes, as well as device information such a phone’s operating system version and whether or not disk encryption is enabled. Companies can use a built-in rules engine to customize what conditions must be met for a login attempt to be authorized.

The acquisition of ScaleFT will help Okta build out its zero trust capabilities. The provider’s identity management platform already includes several of the core features necessary to implement the model, including multifactor authentication and single-sign-on.

ScaleFT Chief Technology Officer Paul Querna is joining Okta to lead the company’s zero trust initiative. The startup’s chief security officer, Marc Rogers, will become executive director of cybersecurity strategy.

Image: Okta