The Gym Group & Okta – partners in strategy
Jasper McIntosh , CIO and Geoff Tinegate , Head of Infrastructure at The Gym Group , explain how Okta has supported them strategically , both throughout the pandemic and with their day — to — day business .
The Gym Group has a unique business model with a contract-free , low cost approach that has enabled them to grow into a successful business with over 180 sites in the UK . Technology has been a key enabler , and facilitating that technology , has been Okta .
“ Okta plays a key part in our technology stack , fundamentally improving our security model , and enabling more features around things like multi-factor authentication ” McIntosh says . “ It ’ s got context-based policies around location-based awareness , and it ’ s really key for health-first strategy based applications that can help us scale . As we continue to grow as a business this is crucially important .”
The Gym Group has multiple cloud applications and a workforce that ’ s spread out all over the UK with diverse skills . “ When we were evaluating Okta , we were looking for something that would fit with a wide range of different authentication processes that were in our existing applications ” McIntosh says . “ We wanted to primarily provide an interface to our staff that was intuitive for them to pick up . It was really important that we had a level of reporting and understanding of how the tool was being used , where it was being used , and what our security profile was , so that we can bring new applications in confidently and understand how our staff are using them .”
With the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic they had to quickly adapt processes , and Okta helped ease these changes . “ Okta ’ s absolutely helped us with that approach , automating a number of the identity access management features and access to applications that all our staff benefit from ” Tinegate says .
“ With the features of Okta around automated lifecycle management , and licence provisioning , it ’ s really helped remove those manual steps that are prone to error and reduce support calls , and also help staff on the ground and in the office be much more productive .”
Like so many other businesses , the Gym Group is looking forward to being fully operational once the pandemic is under control so they can get on with future plans . “ We ’ re really excited to get back to the day job of delivering the gym experience to hundreds of thousands of members ” McIntosh says . “ Behind that initial re-enabling of the business , we ’ re looking to grow both in terms of our core products , and also affiliated products and services that we can bring in . We see Okta having a major role to play in both of these strategies .”
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