To empower employee software decisions, Culture Amp turns to Okta + Zylo for security

A culture of trust

As the world’s leading platform for employee feedback and analytics, Culture Amp takes workplace engagement and satisfaction seriously. That’s why it ensures its own employees have the flexibility they need to manage their jobs as easily and efficiently as possible—which means allowing them the freedom to choose which SaaS applications they want to leverage.

“At Culture Amp, one of our core values is trusting others to make decisions,” says Ryan Ansley, Culture Amp’s Technology Lead. “So that includes people finding new applications in the SaaS landscape and being able to have the freedom to bring applications to IT, as opposed to being a culture where IT dictates that down.”

Culture Amp’s global workforce and client base were growing continuously, but a dynamic time for the business was not without challenges. “Being able to respond to company growth in a way that maintains our current values and structure and the things we’ve already put into place is really important to us,“ says Ansley. To honor this, Ansley and his team needed to guarantee they were working with an agile, scalable system that could smoothly integrate applications while accommodating abrupt changes.

Ensuring secure access for everyone

Fortunately, the Okta Identity Cloud already fit the bill. “We needed to find a solution that would allow our users to maintain the same level of security and access to applications, with ease of provisioning as we grow,” he says. “We were looking around for a good service and Okta was the clear leader.”

The Okta Identity Cloud allowed IT teams to keep track of all these apps and ensure that they’re utilized in a way that’s secure and compliant; it provided a comprehensive understanding of which users had access to which programs, and allowed streamlined, secure access. “When I joined Culture Amp, Okta was already deployed,” recalls Ansley. “We’re now provisioning deeper within Okta than we did before. Previously it was just access to an application. Now we’re provisioning groups and teams within these services.”

Solutions such as Okta’s Universal Directory and Single Sign-On were essential for giving employees autonomy while still enabling IT to have a comprehensive and centralized overview. “To ensure that people are accessing applications in a way that isn’t like the Wild West, it's been great,” notes Ansley.

Meanwhile, Okta Lifecycle Management has made provisioning and deprovisioning easier for Culture Amp: “We know we can respond quickly to staffing changes and address growth that a lot of people experience and a lot of companies of our size experience.“

A holistic perspective of the SaaS ecosystem

Ansley attended Okta’s annual Oktane conference in 2016, and that’s where he first found out about Zylo. Right away, it was clear that the platform would be ideal for Culture Amp, as it provided visibility into the vast SaaS ecosystem and the rates of usage among its various apps. “I could immediately see the value of discovering applications and finding things that are out there, really understanding your landscape, and making sure that you're spending your money effectively and getting the most return on it with utilization.”

With Zylo, Ansley’s team was able to anticipate the utility and popularity of the apps the team was using; as a result, the procurement and partnership process could be proactive rather than reactive. Solutions could also be secured and leveraged company-wide through Okta, rather than resting with individual offices and teams. “Zylo allows us to discover the applications and track utilization,” says Ansley. “Okta allows us to secure those applications and deploy them out to our users in a way that is low friction.”

Given that Culture Amp prides itself on letting its staff make decisions about new applications, this aspect of the Okta and Zylo partnership brings both business and cultural benefits. As Ansley puts it: “Being able to have a system on the backend that empowers people to make those kinds of decisions in a way that still allows us to maintain our commitments to our customers and the security of our platform and product is crucial.“

Planning for the future

Culture Amp already works with over 1,500 organizations, and has offices in Australia, the U.S., and the U.K. Now the company plans to continue expanding the scope of its platform and extending its services to new users. “Our company is going to continue to grow in a way that we're able to support businesses with their HR and employee engagement journey around the world,” explains Ansley. “We need to have a distributed environment. Okta allows us to do that. Okta allows us to have that growth strategy that we would not be able to have otherwise.”

About Culture Amp

Culture Amp is a powerful employee feedback platform that helps make companies better places to work. The platform makes it easy to collect, understand and act on employee feedback, enabling organizations to turn company culture into a competitive edge. Culture Amp is a certified B Corporation used by over 1,700 culture-first companies, including AirBnb, Lyft, Mercy Health, Slack and McDonald’s. Based in Melbourne with offices in San Francisco, London and New York, Culture Amp has raised $76.3M USD from Index Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Blackbird Ventures. Learn more at cultureamp.com and @CultureAmp.

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