Protecting the identity of your users is paramount. Every minute of every day cyber criminals are trying to break security on websites and applications. iTWire regularly reports the sad news of yet another breach, leaking the private details of millions of users around the world. Even if the breach does not end up leaking passwords or credit card information, it still puts a huge dent in the company's reputational damage.

You can't compromise on managing user authentication and identity, and while Okta provides enterprise-grade plans the company says it wants to be a positive force in contributing to a better, safer Internet. As such, Okta president customer identity Shiv Ramji (pictured) announced the company's free plan has been taken to a whole new level. These extra inclusions in the free plan mean there is absolutely no reason for any application or website today to not have robust digital authentication and identity capabilities.

"From the first days we've been focused on empowering developers to make seamless, secure processes for their customers," Ramji told iTWire. Okta has commercial offerings and is used by well-known prominent Australian businesses. However, it's not only for big players. "Sometimes developers have ideas or hobbies and want to tinker. They might not have an app customers are paying for," Ramji said, indicating Okta wants to support them as much as others. Hence its free plan has always been part of the company's product portfolio. "We've been doing that from the birth of the company."

"What's changed is we're enhancing those free tiers, and our self-service paid tiers," he said.

"All of our customers are under attack, especially identity attack," Ramji said, explaining the company's motivation to make the free tier even more appealing to developers so they can try out and test Okta functionality, as well as increasing capabilities like MFA in entry-level plans.

Specifically, Okta has announced:

• the free tier now goes from an allowed 7,500 monthly active users to 25,000
• the free tier now supports unlimited social connectors; previously you could have two. "Login is the front door. We want developers to try us out and don't want them to be limited," Ramji said. These social connectors include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, X, WeChat, and many more. "We give customers choice how to acquire customers, and where they are."
• free tier users can now have a custom domain. "It's seamless; your customers don't need to know it's powered by Okta Auth0. All the branding and URLs will be yours," Ramji said.
• the free tier now offers unlimited Okta connections to easily integrate Okta workforce identity cloud

Ramji confirmed with iTWire that the free tier may be used for commercial purposes, as much as for one's own hobby projects or experiments. Additionally, no credit card is required to sign up. Thus, there's no barrier and no risk, and as such, if you worry your apps and sites have potential to be exposed, then there's also no reason not to check out the Okta free plan right away.

Further, Okta has announced enterprise-grade MFA security has been added to the B2B professional and B2C essentials, bringing enterprise-grade security to these lower tiers, and also that other new plans and enhanced tiers have been released.

The announcements were issued at Okta's recent developer day and all mean Okta is giving away more things. This comes at a real cost to Okta, but "it's in line with our public committment," Ramji said. "We made our Okta secure identity committment because a lot of attacks are identity-based. Identity is security. We want to make sure customers have these tools available to them."

This isn't all; "We're holding our Okta Oktane conference the week of October 15 2024 in Las Vegas," Ramji said. "We'll be announcing additional capabilities and features that will enable developers to experiment and build."