It has already been well established that India is no longer just a large technology market, it is fast becoming a global capability and innovation hub, and identity security company Okta is placing a significant bet on the country as a cornerstone of its global strategy. According to Shakeel Khan, Regional Vice President and Country Manager at Okta, India today sits at the centre of the company’s growth, engineering, and product roadmap.
“India is right at the top of our priority list globally,” Khan says. “Among the nine regions we operate in, India plays a very important role in Okta’s overall growth journey as we scale the business to the next level.”
Okta’s India operations began just a couple of years ahead of October 2023, but the scale-up since then has been rapid. Khan points out that India’s role is not limited to sales or regional execution. “From an operational perspective, product development, security, and core business, India is absolutely critical for us,” he says.
That confidence is reflected in Okta’s hiring and expansion plans. “As we speak today, we have more than 700 employees in India, and we are growing very fast,” Khan notes. “Within the next six months, more than 50 percent of our workforce will be based here, which will make India our largest hub outside the US.”
He goes a step further in defining India’s strategic importance. “You can think of India as our second headquarters after the US,” he says. “That’s the kind of growth parameter we are working towards.”
Crucially, this expansion is rooted in innovation, not cost arbitrage. Over half of Okta’s India workforce consists of engineers building global products used by customers worldwide. “We are not a services delivery team here,” Khan stresses. “We are building products from India for the global market.”
Khan sees this shift as part of a broader transformation in India’s technology ecosystem. “Ten or fifteen years ago, India was largely seen as a BPO or KPO destination,” he says. “That phase has clearly evolved. Today, India is building global products that power the global economy.”
While automation and AI are reshaping the workforce, Khan rejects the notion that innovation and headcount growth are at odds. “The idea that AI will simply replace people is a very narrow view,” he says. “What AI really does is raise the bar. You need stronger engineering, deeper innovation, and better product thinking, and that is exactly where Indian talent stands out.”
At the heart of Okta’s strategy is the belief that identity has become the new security perimeter for enterprises. As organisations accelerate cloud adoption, automation, and AI-driven transformation, identity now determines how trust and access are managed across digital environments.
“The industry made two big mistakes,” Khan explains. “First, identity was treated in a very fragmented way, human identities, customer identities, partner identities, non-human identities, and now AI agents were all managed separately. Second, to fix this fragmentation, the industry introduced more siloed solutions, which actually made the problem worse.”
The consequences are visible across the enterprise security landscape. “Even today, most organisations have some form of identity security in place, yet breaches continue to happen,” Khan says. “In fact, nearly 80 percent of compromises originate on the identity side, largely because different systems don’t talk to each other.”
To address this, Okta is building what it calls an Identity Security Fabric. “We are creating a new category,” Khan says. “The idea is to bring every identity, employees, customers, partners, contractors, non-human identities, AI agents, bots, onto a single platform where intelligence is shared.”
This unified approach enables faster, more decisive responses to threats. Khan highlights how quickly attacks unfold today. “Once an incident happens, the time it takes for an attacker to move laterally is around 52 seconds,” he says. “In less than a minute, a small incident can become a massive breach.”
By integrating identity with the broader security ecosystem, Okta aims to change that equation. “If an endpoint detects malicious activity, we can immediately act on the identity, log the user out, block access, or lock the device,” Khan explains. “This is how you move from a reactive to a proactive security posture.”
The rise of non-human identities and AI agents has further intensified the challenge. As enterprises race to deploy generative AI and agentic systems, visibility and governance have become major concerns. “Right now, there is a huge rush,” Khan observes. “Every boardroom is talking about AI because competitors are automating faster, and the fear of missing out is very real.”
This has given rise to what Khan calls shadow AI. “Anyone can spin up an AI agent today, and there are often no guardrails,” he says. “If you cannot see something, you cannot protect it.”
Okta’s approach to securing AI is rooted in identity. “First, we give organisations visibility into all the AI agents running in their environment,” Khan explains. “Second, we give those AI agents an identity, with clearly defined access, just like a human user. And third, we help customers govern those AI identities throughout their lifecycle.”
Without this discipline, he warns, the risks are significant. “If an AI agent is given access to everything and gets compromised, the damage can be enormous,” Khan says. “Identity-based control is the only scalable way to manage this.”
From a customer standpoint, Okta’s footprint spans virtually every major industry. “Globally, we have more than 22,000 customers, and in India, we already work with some of the country’s largest enterprises,” Khan says. “Major airlines, large IT services firms, leading conglomerates, and manufacturing companies building connected systems, all of them use Okta.”
He sums it up simply by saying “wherever there is identity, you will find Okta.”
On the regulatory front, Khan remains confident that Okta is well prepared for India’s evolving data protection landscape. “We are a global company, and every country has its own compliance requirements,” he says. “If we were not compliant, we simply wouldn’t be able to sell in those markets.”
With the Digital Personal Data Protection Act rolling out in India, Khan does not foresee the need for structural changes. “Data privacy, data residency, and access controls are already built into the product,” he says. “This is not something new for us, it’s how the platform has been designed from day one.”
Looking ahead, Khan believes India’s next phase of growth will depend on strengthening its position as an innovation destination. “India has moved well beyond being a cost-saving centre,” he says. “The focus now should be on enabling innovation and making it easier for global organisations to invest and build from here.”
For Okta, that future is already taking shape. With India on track to become its largest global hub outside the US, the company’s identity-first vision for enterprise security is increasingly being shaped, and built, from the country.