Herd Security Partners With Okta To Transform How Security Teams Protect Their Employees

TL;DR

Herd has built direct integrations with Okta to expand identity access management into a complete human risk protection solution.

Okta locks the doors, Herd trains the people inside. Together, they turn everyday security IAM data into instant learning moments, building a workforce that defends itself.

With 90% of Herd customers already using Okta, it was natural to align our platform to enhance existing identity data and leverage it for educational engagement. Okta customers can instantly onboard Herd to expand identity protection into contextualized content for remediation, training, and risk reduction.

This blog will show how Herd & Okta make security simple and engaging for employees by combining pre-existing IAM policies and extending that reach to human security controls.

Okta is more than identity access management

At its core, Okta is the leading identity access management (IAM) platform in the world. With over 6,000 employees across 5 continents, Okta has become the fortified leader in the space since it’s IPO in 2017.

From IAM, they’ve expanded to cover almost the entire user access stake, including Single Sign On (SSO), Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), lifecycle management, and newer AI-based controls. By anchoring security in identity, Okta has naturally become a core piece of any organization’s cyber defense.

With its coverage across the organization, Okta naturally begins to analyze human interactions with applications across the entire enterprise. With wide visibility, it was natural for Herd to build our initial inference models around telemetry provided by Okta.

What is Herd Security?

The philosophy of Herd Security is simple: help organizations protect their herd — their people — by making cybersecurity more accessible to everyone. To do this, Herd wanted to leverage the people who know security best: the internal security team. After all, who knows an organization better than its own security professionals?

The problem we identified is that enterprises don't prioritize how employees interact with cybersecurity tools. This creates a cascade of issues — adoption of technical tools becomes difficult, the security team gets cast as the bad guys, and security culture becomes an afterthought.

Herd is transforming this narrative by building the first AI creative platform designed specifically for security teams. It's now easier than ever to build communications, training, AI agents, and other tooling that optimizes how employees engage with security tools and knowledge. However, this only works if organizations stop treating security as a compliance checkbox and start treating it as a culture.

Going beyond the compliance checkbox

85% of employees report that the only time they hear about cybersecurity internally is during their annual security training, better known as security awareness training. Although this is training in the name of cybersecurity, it really should be viewed closer to compliance training. Long human resources style videos that people barely pay attention to. Even when forcing attendance, trying to gamify it, nothing seems to work.

This is how security training has been done for the last two decades. But the unforeseen consequence is organizations have unintentionally labeled cybersecurity as something that’s of the same importance as HR. Essentially the police of the organization, that suck the fun out of everything. Think Toby Flenderson from Dunder Mifflin.

Ultimately, this perception is what prevents many security teams from securing their organization. Human error accounts for 80% of vulnerabilities, however, we believe that much of that is due to a lack of proper cybersecurity hygiene. Which in practice, care, and visibility, can be a lot more effective with a different approach.

The Herd approach

Herd was built to make cybersecurity more accessible for every employee. In order to do this, we knew two things needed to happen:

  • Content needed to be easier to create.
  • Security needed to be seen more often than annual security training.

To address content, we centered our focus on how content could be generated quickly, but with context of the organization. How do we understand policies, language, branding, industry, and other information without a huge lift by the current team?

This is where integrations, like Okta, became key to our success. In order to make content that’s right for each organization, we need to understand it first. Okta helps us take the first steps to that by understanding how users interact with their SaaS applications.

With this information, we take our first steps into building workforce engagement, which is driven through modernizing older forms of security training, simulations, and tabletop exercises with generative AI.

How does Herd use Okta data?

Okta already provides a tremendous amount of security information. Why hasn’t anyone leveraged built-in Okta detections, data, and logs to create contextual training?

That’s where Herd comes in. By connecting directly with Okta, we bring real-time training and awareness into the human layer of security.

Here are some powerful examples:

  • Live response to Okta alerts - If Okta detects a brute-force login attempt, Herd immediately prompts the targeted user with a short training on strong passwords and account safety — right in the moment they need it.
  • Behavior-driven remediation - If an employee disables MFA, Herd automatically delivers a curated module via Slack. The user learns why MFA matters and how to fix their mistake instantly.
  • From incident to education in minutes - If one employee reports a phishing email, Herd amplifies that exact attack into a training simulation for the entire organization. Everyone learns from a real-world event, not a hypothetical scenario.

By pairing Okta’s identity protection with Herd’s behavioral reinforcement, organizations finally get end-to-end defense for the human layer.

Real-world impact: from threat to training in minutes

The power of Herd isn’t theoretical. Our customers are already seeing transformational results.

One Unicorn defense startup discovered an engineering vulnerability in a GitHub pull request. Remediating the issue and then creating a training module may take weeks. With Herd, the security team was able to:

  • Identify and block the vulnerability,
  • Convert it into a tailored training for engineers, and
  • Distribute it across the team within 5 minutes.

The results spoke for themselves: 90% of engineers completed the training within 24 hours, reinforcing secure coding habits at the exact moment it mattered most.

That’s the difference between compliance and culture.

Try Herd with Okta today

Cybersecurity is no longer just the job of the security team; it’s the responsibility of the entire organization. Herd exists to make that shift possible, turning static compliance training into dynamic, engaging, and adaptive learning.

Okta secures your identity layer. Herd secures your human layer. Together, they deliver the strongest defense organizations can have.

Okta is one of many: Herd also reads from Slack, Teams, Entra ID, your SIEM and your HRIS. See every integration.

👉 If you’re already an Okta customer, you can try Herd today and see the benefits instantly.