San Francisco, CA — November 13, 2024 — Persona, a leading global identity platform, today announced a partnership with Okta to provide an automated identity verification solution to help organizations verify workforce identities and protect against phishing and deepfakes. Organizations can enforce identity verification throughout the employee lifecycle using Okta's out-of-the-box integration with Persona's identity verification service, enhancing security measures for organizations worldwide.

Addressing Workforce Identity Challenges

As businesses have migrated to cloud-based technologies and distributed workforces, traditional network security models find themselves increasingly vulnerable to phishing attacks. Identity, in particular, has become a prominent attack vector for cybercriminals.

To help teams solve these challenges, organizations can use Persona's automated identity verification solution that addresses key security needs, particularly during moments that are particularly ripe for attack, including new employee onboarding, authentication, and account recovery. By combining Okta's expertise in identity and access management with Persona's dynamic identity verification capabilities, the partnership enhances organizations' defenses against social engineering and deepfake attacks.

Additionally, both companies are focused on helping customers make sure that these enhanced security measures do not introduce unnecessary friction for employees. For Persona, this challenge is met by the company's Dynamic Flow capability, which allows companies to configure verification flows that adjust in real time to the risk level of each user. Users who present minimal risk get verified quickly, while users who present more risk are asked to submit more information, or go through more checks. The resulting process maintains security without frustrating low-risk users.

"We are excited to partner with Okta to enhance security for organizations in today's dynamic work environment," said Rick Song, CEO of Persona. "Okta partnered with Persona because of our ability to create flexible and dynamic identity verification experiences that can be personalized to each specific use case and each user. By integrating with Okta's Workforce Identity Cloud, we're able to verify identities during high-risk events while minimizing friction for users. This partnership allows us to jointly tackle the critical need for identity verification, providing an additional layer of phishing resistance that hasn't traditionally been used for employee security—all while ensuring a seamless user experience."

"Organizations aim to provide secure, seamless access to drive business growth," said Stephen Lee, VP of Technical Strategy and Partnerships at Okta. "Yet, cybercriminals increasingly target workers through phishing and other identity-based attacks, especially during onboarding and account recovery when identity assurance is lower. Identity verification allows organizations to confirm the identity of users with verification methods such as government IDs or selfies. By integrating with Persona, organizations can gain deeper risk insights and add another layer of security to help ensure that only verified users have access to your network."

How Persona Safeguards Against Phishing from Onboarding to Offboarding

The identity verification integration between Persona's platform and Okta's Workforce Identity Cloud, enables dynamic identity management that balances high assurance with a seamless user experience. Key benefits include:

• Available via the Okta Integration Network: The integration with Persona's identity verification solution can be easily added inside the Okta platform. By creating rules within authentication policies, admins can incorporate identity verification steps at critical moments like onboarding, account recovery, or when suspicious activity is detected without needing engineering resources to implement this authentication method.

• Multiple Verification Methods: Persona offers various identity verification methods, including government ID checks, biometric verifications like selfies, and database verification to provide a comprehensive approach to identity security.

• Multi-Layered Fraud Defense: To combat deepfakes and other fraud types, Persona provides a wide array of methods to collect identity-proofing evidence and combines it with behavioral risk assessments and other passive signals to actively segment your user base and immediately respond to potential fraud.

• Compliance Standards: Persona's platform aligns with industry compliance standards and company-specific risk frameworks, including NIST IAL2, helping ensure that organizations meet their regulatory requirements while maintaining high-security standards.

At Oktane 2024, Persona hosted a dedicated session focused on how Okta users can leverage identity verification to strengthen their phishing resistance. Additionally, Persona was featured as an identity verification partner during the Workforce Identity Cloud keynote that showcased how organizations can guard against identity-based attacks.

Okta's identity verification integration with Persona is available to Okta Workforce Identity Cloud customers in early access.

To learn more about Persona and Okta visit: https://withpersona.com/blog/persona-okta-partnership

About Persona

Persona offers a unified identity platform that gives businesses the building blocks they need to securely collect, verify, manage, and make decisions about individuals' and businesses' identities — along with automation and orchestration tools to streamline the entire process from end to end.

Founded in 2018, Persona is headquartered in San Francisco and is available in 200+ countries and territories and 20 different languages. Persona serves any business that needs to verify its customers online, including retail, fintech, marketplace, delivery services, real estate and hospitality, HR, edtech, legal services, home and childcare services, and more. For additional information, please visit https://withpersona.com/