A customer shared this story with us last month.

Their new IAM administrator logged into Okta and made a seemingly minor change in a network zone directly in production, following an urgent request. In retrospect, this change wasn’t as minor as they thought–as a result, an entire department lost access to their systems because of that.

The IAM team learned about it from the avalanche of internal emails reporting the bug. The issue took 3 hours to investigate, find, and manually revert to the previous state. This amounted to some $$$ lost for the company due to the downtime.

The team shared that afterward they were asked to create a more agile backup and restore protocol for Okta configuration–and they really wished they thought about it before the incident.

Many of your IAM peers would have a similar story happened at some point in their career. Having a reliable configuration backup is critical for Okta, especially for enterprise IAM teams: many hands touch the system every day and the risk of a bad change creeping in is very high.

That’s why we added Configuration Backup & Restore to Salto–to help our customers protect their Okta tenants with automated configuration backup and stress-free recovery.

Automated, flexible configuration backup with Salto

If you’re not familiar with Salto yet, it’s a DevOps platform for configuration change management for IT and business applications, including Okta. In addition to impact analysis, change deployment, monitoring, and automated change documentation, we’re now offering our customers secure configuration backup. 

Your configuration will be automatically backed up from day one of connecting your Okta tenant to Salto and fetching it for the first time. You can schedule a desired frequency of your backups: hourly, daily, or weekly. It’s also possible to make an on-demand backup whenever you need one. 
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Restore your Okta configuration to a point-in-time in a few clicks

If something goes wrong, be it a human error or a malicious change, and you need to restore your configuration, you have two easy ways to do that in Salto.

You can restore all or part of your Okta configuration to one of the previous versions. Salto also allows you to undo your changes granularly: one or more out of many. You can compare your tenant’s current state with a previous version (which you can select based on a timestamp) and either restore everything or manually pick the elements you want to restore. 

One of the customers we recently showed the new Backup & Restore feature to called it “an absolute lifesaver” and we can’t agree more.

Here’s how it works:

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Easily revert configuration changes made in Salto

Our users make most of the changes to their Okta configurations via Salto (discover why it’s the easiest and most secure way). So as part of this product update, we also added the capability to revert your Salto deployments. 

Imagine that you deployed a change and later found an issue with it. You can now quickly revert this specific deployment without having to manually undo the changes.

For that, go to the Compare & Deploy tab, select one or more deployments you’d like to undo, and click Revert. This will undo all of the changes introduced to your Okta tenant by the selected Salto deployments:
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Coming back to the story I shared in the beginning: with Salto, it would have taken a few clicks to resolve that incident instead of 3 hours of stressful investigation. Having a reliable configuration backup solution means you never have to worry about something like that happening to your IAM team. Talk to one of Salto's experts to learn how to protect your tenant >>