IT and security teams reviewing Okta while non-human identities grow faster than staff.
Which of workforce SSO, privileged access, or runtime agent authorization is the actual requirement.
The control gap
Okta alternative searches usually start with cost, an admin experience, or a licensing model. Increasingly they start somewhere else: an audit asked how many non-human identities exist and what they can reach, and nobody could answer. Workforce identity providers were built to answer that question about people, and they answer it well. Agents are not people, they are created by developers rather than by HR, and their permissions are decided by a tool schema rather than by a joiner process.
What good looks like
The workforce estate stays where it works, and agent authority is governed by something that can see individual tool calls.
- Inventory non-human identities separately from staff accounts, including the credentials issued to agents by developers.
- Decide whether each agent acts as itself, on behalf of a person, or both, and require the delegation to be visible in the record.
- Put an enforcement point where the agent calls a tool, since that is the only place the concrete action exists.
- Keep joiner, mover, and leaver processes in the workforce platform. Agents need creation and revocation, not a lifecycle borrowed from employment.
A production workflow
- List the agents in production and the credential each one holds today.
- For each, name the actions it can take that would be expensive to undo.
- Decide per action: automatic, denied, or human-approved, and write it as policy.
- Run in shadow mode against real traffic before enforcing, and measure how often the approval path fires.
Evidence to require
- A count of non-human identities and their capabilities, refreshed rather than compiled once for an audit.
- The delegation chain for each agent action: which workload, acting for which person.
- Actions denied or held for approval, with the reason and the policy version.
- Revocation events and the time between revocation and the next blocked call.
Buyer checklist
- Can you currently answer how many agents exist and what each can reach?
- Does the candidate see individual actions, or only sessions and sign-ins?
- Who creates agent credentials today, and does that path involve any review?
- What happens to an agent's access when the person who created it leaves?
Practical answers
Common implementation questions
Does Endram replace Okta?
No. Endram has no workforce directory, no SSO for staff applications, and no lifecycle management for employees. It governs what an agent may do once it is already authenticated.
Can a workforce identity platform govern agents?
It can hold their identities and issue their credentials, which is genuinely useful. What it does not see is the individual tool call, so it cannot deny one action while allowing another under the same credential.
Where should agent inventory live?
Wherever it is refreshed automatically. An inventory assembled by hand for an audit is out of date the week after, and the number of agents in a working codebase changes faster than any manual process.