Howard Hughes Corp enables secure collaboration with Dropbox and Okta

With over 1,200 employees and thousands of external contractors, Howard Hughes Corporation is one of the largest real estate companies in the US. To better enable employee mobility and collaboration, the company chose to move their enterprise applications to the cloud, but looked for a way to do so that would ensure data security without impacting user adoption.

To kick off the effort, Howard Hughes Corporation implemented Okta Cloud Connect to manage the various enterprise apps used in their organization, including Office 365, Salesforce, and Workday. A big driver of the company’s move to the cloud was its user-centric approach to IT.

When it came to standardizing on a single collaboration solution for internal and external users, Vibha Gore, Senior IT Director at Howard Hughes Corporation knew Dropbox was the tool of choice for employees and external collaborators.

“We needed a way to centralize and control un-administered usage of Dropbox. Through the clear documentation and SDKs available in the Dropbox Platform, it was clearly the best solution for our custom workflows.” Once Dropbox was selected as Howard Hughes’ collaboration tool, Vibha leveraged the Okta and Dropbox integration to enable employees and contractors to securely send and sync large files to local drives, as well as distribute them to external partners on mobile and desktop.

“Dropbox is a natural fit for our organization because we can manage access and permissions through Okta. This integration not only provided us with control over internal and external collaboration, but it reduced the burden of administering the tool,” explains Vibha.

What’s more, the integration allowed the Howard Hughes IT team to gain full control over employee and external collaboration environments. They can now suspend, off-board, and reinstate Dropbox user accounts, which was critical for controlling documents shared outside the company. They also can directly sync the security groups established in Okta across users in Dropbox to ensure users have consistent and easy access to files in Dropbox.

By deploying Dropbox, Vibha’s team has reduced infrastructure costs and can now focus on automating business processes and driving productivity to add business value.

“By offering controlled access to Dropbox through Okta, we can power digital transformation for our employees and external collaborators. We can also access data points across our operations so we can make the most intelligent decisions for our organization,” she explains.

Interested in learning more?

Dropbox is hosting an exclusive breakout session featuring Howard Hughes Corporation at the Oktane conference in New Orleans on Wednesday, August 29 from 11:45 am to 12:30 pm PT. Learn more and register here. If you can’t make it to Oktane, check out our recent webinar with Okta.