HPE's Transformation of Cloud Service Delivery with Okta

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is a global technology company that provides a wide range of products and services, including data storage, servers, networking, consulting and support, and financial services. The company is currently transitioning all of its on-premises IT infrastructure products to cloud-based as-a-service offerings. HPE serves over 11,000 customers in more than 150 countries. In 2019, the company introduced HPE GreenLake Central, a sub-brand that delivers consumption-based IT services, enabling customers to build a seamless experience between their public and private clouds.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is undergoing a significant transformation, aiming to transition all of its on-premises IT infrastructure products to cloud-based as-a-service offerings by 2022. This move is driven by increasing customer demand for cloud-based services. In 2019, HPE introduced GreenLake Central, a sub-brand that delivers consumption-based IT services, enabling customers to build a seamless experience between their public and private clouds. However, the GreenLake Central platform has significant identity requirements, such as the need to securely federate and authenticate various user types including administrators, support teams, customers, and partners—all within a single user interface. To meet these identity requirements, HPE needed an identity and access management (IAM) partner to help integrate enterprise identities and secure APIs.

HPE partnered with Okta to provide unified IAM for its advanced GreenLake Central platform. The company deployed a hub and spoke identity architecture with one Okta organization per HPE customer. This setup enables Okta’s full capabilities within every tenant and allows HPE to customize tenants as needed for different user groups. When customers log in to GreenLake Central, they’re routed through a specific Okta organization to their identity provider, then issued an access token. Okta Single Sign-On offers integrations with authentication and authorization frameworks such as SAML,OAuth, and OIDC, as well as integrates with Active Directory. Okta also provides HPE with tailored services to support specific employee tenants. HPE uses Okta Hooks to empower its IT team to easily integrate systems with custom code on any cloud, hybrid, or on-prem infrastructure.

• The implementation of Okta has allowed HPE to deliver a user-friendly, front-end customer experience, with Okta providing identity services in the background. The company uses Okta MFA to offer numerous authentication factor options to its customers. In addition, with Okta B2B Integration, HPE’s customers can use their existing IAM solution to gain access to HPE’s services. If a customer doesn’t have their own identity solution, Okta provides the ability for them to integrate their own SSO provider or on-prem directory with HPE. Using Okta Lifecycle Management for SCIM-based provisioning, HPE has built integrations with a number of partner SaaS providers, which the organization manages on behalf of its customers.

• HPE was able to implement Okta quickly, with an initial product deployment of just four weeks.

• The company has deployed hundreds of Okta organizations and plans to take that number into the thousands.