Okta Salesforce Integration: 2 Easy Steps

Most of the companies are modernizing and moving into the cloud. While businesses primarily use Salesforce CRM (Customer Relationship Management) to manage their customer records and engagement, Salesforce now offers many more services such as Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Mobile Connectivity, etc. Salesforce’s services allow businesses to use Cloud Technology to better connect with clients, customers, and partners. This gives them immense flexibility, infinite scale, and a fully connected workforce.

As companies begin to explore the number of ways in which they use Salesforce, they look for the possibility of identity management and application integration to drive their business forward. That’s where Okta Salesforce integration comes in.

With every organization moving most of its business into the cloud, it is essential to unify identity across your on-premise and cloud systems. Okta, an Identity and Access Management company, provides cloud software that helps companies manage and secure user authentication into applications. With a single log-in, Okta gives you direct access to all your applications.

Using Salesforce to manage your Marketing Activities and Customer Information is helpful, but businesses want to save time and log in up to 50% faster by leveraging Salesforce Okta integration. In this article, you’ll see how to set up an Okta integration with Salesforce to access all your applications anytime and anywhere in a fully secure manner. Before getting into the details, let’s discuss Okta and Salesforce in brief.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Salesforce
• Introduction to Okta
  • Key Features of Okta
• Purpose of Okta Salesforce Integration
• Process Compatibility
• Prerequisites
• Set Up Okta Single Sign-On (SSO) with Salesforce
• Setting up User Provisioning in Okta
• Conclusion

Introduction to Salesforce

Salesforce, a Cloud-Based Customer Relationship Management (CRM), provides a full-fledged Customer Relationship Management solution to businesses without spending much effort on building one. Salesforce is the most popular and robust Cloud-Based CRM software designed to support organizations in managing their Sales and Marketing data. Together with Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez, Marc Benioff founded Salesforce.com in 1999, and today, Salesforce is considered the king of CRM for plenty of Entrepreneurs, Business Owners, and Corporations.

Salesforce will help you accomplish several Marketing Goals by storing and keeping track of all your Customer Data, Contact Data, and Marketing Leads. You can also generate Sales Forecast Reports with Salesforce to convert your leads. Salesforce also supports Email integration with applications like Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, etc. They have just about everything that you could think of when it comes to operations in a business and managing their customers.

Also, Salesforce is Cloud-based, implying that it can provide high flexibility and scalability to its users. Salesforce is the ultimate solution for your business as it allows for all the necessary elements for your business on an automation platform with embedded intelligence.

Salesforce follows a subscription-based model and offers a variety of pricing options, ranging from $25 to about $300 per user every month.

You can think of combining your Salesforce data with data coming from various other sources in your Data Warehouse to get valuable insights for your business. You can use automated tools like Hevo Data to integrate data across Salesforce and other sources to a Data Warehouse of your choice.

Also, check out our Ultimate Guide on Salesforce.

Introduction to Okta

Okta, an Identity Management service, allows any employer to access any application on any device. It runs on a secured platform. Founded in 2009, Okta Identity Cloud enables you to connect to your most essential things fast, from applications to critical infrastructure, Office 365, Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, plus thousands of new integrations and counting. In simple words, Okta gives you a Single Sign On (SSO) access to Cloud, On-Premises, and Mobile applications. It connects to SaaS and custom applications using open protocols such as SAML, and OpenID Connect, for a consistent single sign-on experience.

Incorporating Okta in your company will enable seamless access for all your users across numerous devices and endless services, and all of this while protecting business-critical data from hackers. Yes, Okta protects your On-Premises and Cloud systems from modern identity attacks with continuous authentication and authorization.

Key Features of Okta

Okta is widely used as an Identity and Access Management platform by the largest companies in the world, and the following features are responsible for its immense popularity:

• Single sign-on is one such feature that makes Okta unique by allowing users access to many applications at a time with one log. It reduces the burden of remembering multiple passwords and also saves the login time for each application.
• It provides an added layer of security by using a particular application named Multifactor Authentication (MFA).
• Other essential features include Provisioning, Active Dictionary, and LDAP integration. Okta also has a mobile app, namely Mobile Okta, which further simplifies your life.

So, if you are interested in centralizing identity into a single pane of glass, switching to Okta is the best thing you can do for your company.

Purpose of Okta Salesforce Integration

Your company uses Salesforce to track leads, forecast, and manage accounts with authority. But, to effectively manage your time, it’s necessary to integrate your Salesforce with a third-party Identity and Access Management service provider. That’s where Okta comes into the picture. Okta Salesforce integration lets users have centralized and secure access to all the applications.

You can use the Okta Salesforce integration to:

• Update a user profile in Salesforce with the user profile in Okta on a regular basis. Profile updates across the two platforms are directly imported.
• Import (new) users created in a third-party application into Okta.
• Push (new) users created in Okta directly into Salesforce.
• Automate two-way data sync between Salesforce and Okta in real-time.
• Reactivate user accounts in Salesforce.

Now that you’re aware of the benefits your organization can reap with the Okta Salesforce integration, it’s time to establish the integration. You can do so by enabling Single Sign-On (SSO) and User Provisioning in Okta with Salesforce.

Process Compatibility

• The Salesforce Okta integration supports only the Salesforce User object. Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunity objects within Salesforce are not supported.
• Okta cannot auto-update all user attributes in Salesforce while selectively excluding Profile or Role from being updated.
• Deactivating a user in Okta deactivates the user’s account in Salesforce.

Prerequisites

To set up an Okta Salesforce integration, you:

• Should have a Salesforce account.
• Should have an Okta account.
• Need to install the Okta Verify app.

Set Up Okta Single Sign-On (SSO) with Salesforce

The Single Sign-On (SSO) login is more secure and convenient than using a username and password every time you log in. This is the first step for establishing the Okta Salesforce integration. The integration is pretty much straightforward. The following steps to set up Okta SSO with Salesforce are listed below.

• From your Okta dashboard, click on the “Applications” tab located at the top.
• Click on the “Add Application” button.

• Search for “Salesforce” in the search box and click on “Salesforce.com”.

• Click on “Add Button” to add Salesforce.com to the list of your active applications.
• You’ll be redirected to the “General Settings” tab where you can enter your information related to your Salesforce Org.
• Click on “Next” to move on to the “Sign On” tab.
• Select SAML 2.0, and click on “View Setup Instructions” to learn more about the SSO setup.

• To enable SSO in Salesforce, click on “Setup” and select “Identity”.
• Click on “Single Sign-On Settings”. 
• Click on “Edit” and make sure the “SAML Enabled” box is checked. Save your settings.

• Click on “New” and enter the required information.
  • You can enter a “Name” of your choice.
  • You can copy-paste “Identity Provider Login URL” and “Custom Logout URL” from your Okta page.
  • You can fetch the “Issuer” value from View Setup Instructions.
  • Download the “Identity Provider Certificate” from Okta and upload it in the required field.
  • In the “Entity ID” field, you can enter “https://[CustomDomain].my.salesforce.com” if you have a custom domain setup. Otherwise, enter “https://saml.salesforce.com”.

• Save your settings.
• Salesforce will now generate a “Login URL”.
• Go back to Okta and enter this Login URL in the “Advanced Sign-on Setting” to enable SSO for Salesforce.

This is how you can set up a Single Sign-On with Salesforce. Let’s move on to the next step of Okta Salesforce integration.

Setting up User Provisioning in Okta

To share user and group data between Okta and Salesforce, you need to set up User Provisioning in Okta. You’ll need the Salesforce account username and password, and the token to configure the provisioning settings.

• From your Okta dashboard, click on the “Applications” tab located at the top.
• Search for “Salesforce.com” and click on it.
• Click on the “Provisioning” tab.
• A message will be displayed saying “Provisioning is not enabled”. Click on the “Configure API Integration” button under the message.

• Make sure the “Enable API Integration” box is checked.
• To enable the integration, provide your Username, and Password along with your Token.
• Click on “Save”.
• You can edit the Okta to Salesforce provisioning settings by clicking on the “To App” tab in the Settings list.
• You can edit the Salesforce to Okta provisioning settings by clicking on the “To Okta” tab in the Settings list.

• You can now assign users to Salesforce by clicking on the “Directory” tab.
• Click on “People” and select the username you want to assign the application to.
• Select and assign the application to the user by clicking on “Assign Applications”.

This is how you can set up User Provisioning in Okta. Your Okta Salesforce integration is now ready to sync data between both platforms.

Conclusion

In this fastly developing world, organizations are getting increasingly reliant on Cloud-Based Applications. It is essential to unify identity across all your systems. As the work increases, companies need to better plan their schedule and manage their time, which is one of the secrets of success. Okta Salesforce integration lets you do just that, it fulfills your needs and meets all your requirements.

In this blog, you have learned about Okta, Salesforce, and how to achieve Okta Salesforce integration. However, working with Okta Salesforce integration can be a little tedious. If you want to automate your data flow between Salesforce and Okta, you can further explore no-code automated integration solutions like Hevo Data.

If you are an advanced user of Salesforce, you are most probably dealing with a lot of data sources, both internally and from other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. Having all this data in one place helps in analysis and accelerates the Decision-Making Process. Accomplishing this requires integration to all such third-party apps and services. Salesforce’s Scheduled Data Load is a recommended approach by Salesforce. But this approach can be ineffective when you’re dealing with a large number of diverse data sources. In such cases, Hevo Data can be a great asset in your ETL tool portfolio.

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Hevo Data, with its strong integration with 100+ Sources & BI tools such as Salesforce (Free Data Source), allows you to not only export data from sources & load data in the destinations, but also transform & enrich your data, & make it analysis-ready so that you can focus only on your key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools. You can easily extract data from Salesforce using Hevo to track the performance of your business and optimize it further to increase revenue.

Give Hevo Data a try and sign up for a 14-day free trial today. Hevo offers plans & pricing for different use cases and business needs, check them out!

Do you use Salesforce? Share your experience of working with Okta Salesforce integration in the comments section below.