Partner Testimonial

Upright Security:
Okta’s 2021 EMEA
Partner of the Yeardelivers comprehensive
security expertise in a
multi-cloud world, helping
customers keep data safe

Partner Testimonial

Upright Security

TestimonialsnapshotCompany
Upright Security

Industry
Security

Company Profile
Remember when working from home was a novelty and most mornings beganwith a commute? Back then, controlling access to company assets was pretty
straightforward: firewalls protected the corporate network from outside threats.
The IT landscape and our ways of working have evolved since then. Upright
Security was in a prime position to watch these changes unfold and shape theway identity and access management (IAM) solves the challenges they created.
Founded in 2006 as part of the Cronos Group, one of Belgium’s leading IT
solution providers, and rebranded as Upright Security in 2018, the security
specialist enables companies to implement the tools that keep their data safe.
And, while this core mission has remained the same since Upright’s founding,the breadth and scope of its offerings have developed.
“We started offering identity and access management services before thecloud was a thing, when the IT landscape was relatively simple,” says BartCools, Managing Partner at Upright Security. “As this landscape changed, webroadened our horizons, adding cloud, data, and API security to our portfolio.
Today, we cover all IAM and security needs for on-premises, in the cloud, orwith hybrid setups.”

Partner Testimonial

Upright Security

2021
1stOkta EMEA Partner of the Year

Okta Elite Partner in the EMEA region“For our new portfolio, we wanted topartner with a company that doesn’t
just have the technical capabilities,
but also the same drive, the sameenergy we have. That’s what we
found in Okta.

Bart Cools
Managing Partner, Upright Security

Partner Testimonial

Forging long-term
partnerships by adding
value and building trust

Turning customers intofans with award-winning
Okta expertise

Making a difference forgrowing and establishedcompanies

Gaining steam with eachnew success

Upright Security

Selecting Okta for security, manageability, and cost
Knowing that technology evolves faster than most companies’ ability to keepup, Upright Security strives to build long-term partnerships with everyone. Bygetting to know each customer’s technology setup and training employees, ithelps them navigate each challenge with an unparalleled level of support. That’s
why some customers, such as Belgium’s largest telco Telenet, have been with
Upright Security for more than a decade.
The secret to building these long-term partnerships? Bart says it’s in the name:“Upright” translates from the Belgian term “oprecht,” meaning sincere. This
demonstrates the company’s dedication to working in each customer’s bestinterest. “We’re not driven by commercial interest, we’re driven by the desire
to make our customers happy,” says Bart.
But there’s another dimension to Upright Security’s name, which refers to theGartner Magic Quadrant, a report visualising the positioning of tech companies,
putting leaders on the “upper right.” Upright Security strives to work with thebest solutions on the market, only implementing products it believes in. And
Okta fits that bill.

Partner Testimonial

Forging long-term
partnerships by adding
value and building trust

Turning customers intofans with award-winning
Okta expertise

Upright Security

Turning customers into fans with award-winning Okta expertise
Upright Security selected Okta as a central solution for its service offering in2018 as part of an effort to diversify its IAM portfolio. Why Okta? It begins witha shared vision: “For our new portfolio, we wanted to partner with a company
that doesn’t just have the technical capabilities, but also the same drive, thesame energy we have. That’s what we found in Okta,” explains Bart.

Making a difference forgrowing and establishedcompanies

Crucially, Upright’s customers love Okta. Not content with just offering astrategic vision and implementing the tools to help companies get there, Upright
Security wants customers to be passionate about these tools. “Okta’s excellent
reputation helps us excite customers from the onset,” says Bart. “After our pitch,
we want customers to be enthusiastic, to become our champions, to say ‘I wantOkta, and I want Upright.’ In our experience, that’s the case.”

Gaining steam with eachnew success

Upright’s security experts live and breathe IAM. They were thrilled to discoveran exciting new playground with Okta. For Bart and his team, expertise iseverything, and they brought that same approach to Okta, determined to getto know the platform inside out.
“Okta is great at enabling partners,” says Bart. “The platform is very open, andthere’s extensive documentation for everything. We also had a dedicated teamat Okta who supported us with comprehensive training, helping us to go indepth with what Okta can do.”
The hard work paid off: With one of the largest Okta-enabled teams in EMEA,
Upright Security has its Okta expertise on full display. Specialists in the entire
Okta suite, the team helps companies on the enterprise level, secure their assets,and with B2B, B2C, and B2E integrations.
In 2021, Upright received the Okta EMEA Partner of the Year Award. Cédric
Gossé, Security Architect and Partner at Upright Security, was even elected
Okta’s technical champion for the Benelux region. “We value the trust Okta
has put in us,” says Bart. “Now, Okta don’t even send their sales engineers
to pitch meetings, confident that we can run it ourselves, because we’re sofamiliar with their solutions.”

Partner Testimonial

Forging long-term
partnerships by adding
value and building trust

Turning customers intofans with award-winning
Okta expertise

Making a difference forgrowing and establishedcompanies

Gaining steam with eachnew success

Upright Security

Making a difference for growing and established companies

Trust is also key to Upright Security’s customer relationships. Its first big
Okta deal was with the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA). RBFA waslooking for the right Customer Identity (CIAM) solution as part of its digitaltransformation strategy. Based on the RBFA’s needs, to simplify the user
experience by consolidating all of its digital platforms with a single identity,
Upright Security helped select and implement Okta as the ideal solution.
Today, the company manages access at scale with User Management, and morethan a million monthly users log into RBFA’s digital channels via Okta – that’s 1 in
10 Belgians. “By delivering a successful implementation, we built the company’s
trust in Okta, so much so that they’ve since started using Okta’s Workforce
Identity solutions and Advanced Server Access too,” adds Bart.
Other partnerships, such as Telenet, were formed before Upright’s move toOkta, but they gained steam with the new IAM portfolio. Due to Telenet’s hybrid
environment, including more than 95 on-premises and 50 SaaS applications
used by both employees and external professionals, access management had
been challenging. With Okta, Upright Security tackled it head-on, helping
Telenet deliver Single Sign-On with Adaptive Multi-factor Authentication for adiverse set of users.
“We need to manage more than 14,000 identities in a secure, compliant, costefficient, and flexible way across multiple environments,” says Mark Van Tiggel,Director Security at Telenet. “Okta enabled us to do that, and with a level ofend-to-end implementation support from Upright Security that’s difficult tofind for other identity solutions.”

Partner Testimonial

Forging long-term
partnerships by adding
value and building trust

Turning customers intofans with award-winning
Okta expertise

Making a difference forgrowing and establishedcompanies

Gaining steam with eachnew success

Upright Security

Gaining steam with each new success
These are big examples, but Upright Security brings the same level of care anddedication to smaller projects and companies. Customers trust Upright Security
to make the right call, whatever the background, whatever the situation. That
includes emergencies – and when security is on the line, the stakes are high.
“One morning, a customer we had helped implement Okta on the Customer
Identity side called, saying they’d been fending off an attack all night,” remembers
Bart. We rolled out Okta’s workforce solutions in less than 12 hours, protecting
all 2,500 users with MFA and stopping the attack. That was groundbreaking
for us, achieving this time-to-market with Okta was incredible.”
The Upright Security team is proud of its achievements, but winning Okta’s
EMEA Partner of the Year Award is not the ceiling. Next, they’re opening a
German division, expanding to the DACH region, and bringing first-class Okta
support to more customers. “We’re growing from a Belgian player into an EMEA
partner, enabling Okta to work with us on a local level, with commercial profiles
on the ground,” says Bart.
And the best part? Fifteen years on, for Upright Security, doing what they
do isn’t just a job, it’s a pleasure. “We love helping our customers, and we’repassionate about identity and access management,” says Bart. “It’s been one
hell of a ride, and we can’t wait to see what’s next. We’re driven by success,and that’s what we found in Okta.”