monday.com faced a challenge familiar to many rapidly growing organizations: empowering teams to work with the tools they need, while maintaining security and control at scale. With hundreds of employees joining each year and departments selecting their own specialized applications, the company’s decentralized approach to software adoption created a blind spot that traditional identity solutions couldn’t solve.
monday.com’s engineering-first culture values autonomy. Teams can rapidly adopt applications and tools that fit their needs, whether they can be centrally managed by their identity and access management system (Okta) or not. While this may speed up productivity, it also increases security risk as the company scales.
By 2024, the company had surpassed $1B in ARR and grown to 2,100+ employees. This scale created enormous complexity in managing applications and access. IT identified hundreds of applications in use that were managed by individual business units that weren’t connected to Okta. After integrating about 150 apps using identity standards like SAML and SCIM, the team hit a ceiling: the rest couldn’t support these standards, leaving no way to enable SSO or automate user provisioning.
The consequences were significant. Manual identity lifecycle work consumed 3,300+ hours per year, the equivalent of more than two full-time employees, costing the company over $250K annually. On top of that, IT faced daily operational headaches: shared accounts required manual credential resets when users left, new hires waited days for access, and audits meant piecing together logs from disconnected systems with no centralized visibility.
The team explored workarounds like building custom API integrations or leveraging RPA. Both approaches fell short: APIs were inconsistent or expensive, and RPA was brittle, costly, and not purpose-built for identity workflows.
A trusted partner introduced monday.com to Cerby, designed for disconnected applications that do not fit the traditional identity mold. The task was direct: extend enterprise-grade security, automation, and governance to every application, even those that couldn’t natively integrate with Okta.
During the proof of concept, the value was clear and immediate. Users could click a previously disconnected app from the Okta dashboard, with Cerby handling authentication in the background—securely auto-filling credentials and completing MFA, all without end-user intervention.
Most importantly, Cerby enabled monday.com to fully automate lifecycle management for applications that couldn’t natively connect to Okta. Access is now granted or removed automatically based on a user’s identity in Okta—whether someone joins, changes roles, or leaves—without any manual intervention.
This brought previously disconnected apps into the same identity framework as the rest of monday.com’s stack, eliminating tedious manual workarounds and reducing risk. What once required spreadsheets and constant IT oversight is now handled entirely through automation via Cerby.
monday.com set aggressive targets and the Cerby team matched the urgency. Starting from 20 supported applications, the teams worked together to scale to nearly 200, building integrations, enabling self-service onboarding, and refining workflows.
monday.com strengthened its identity posture, bringing visibility, security, and automation to a previously unmanageable set of applications.
At the start of 2025, only 20% of applications were centrally managed through Okta via SAML or SCIM. By mid-2025, that number reached 78% and continues to grow. Nearly 200 applications that previously had no identity integration are now connected to Okta via Cerby, enabling centralized management, automated provisioning, and consistent governance. The new goal is 90%+ by the end of 2025.
Manual identity lifecycle tasks are now fully automated through Cerby. Access is granted or revoked instantly based on roles and groups. When employees depart, Cerby triggers immediate deprovisioning across all apps. The result: over $400,000 in manual lifecycle management costs recouped and a 280% total ROI with Cerby.
What used to be a multi-week audit exercise is now a streamlined review. Cerby centralizes access logs across all apps—including those previously invisible to IT—saving over 2,400 hours annually on manual compliance work.This visibility became a strategic win shared with leadership and investors.
Cerby also delivered direct cost savings through improved license visibility. By identifying unused or overprovisioned licenses across disconnected applications, monday.com reclaimed unused seats that were assigned to users who didn’t need them or were inactive. In fact, 20% of licenses were not being used, resulting in over $130K in annual software license savings.
With Cerby, previously disconnected apps now appear in Okta alongside the rest of the app stack. New hires get instant, role-based access and a seamless SSO experience into every app they need—on day one. Onboarding survey scores improved markedly.
For years, the identity narrative was binary: block the application and limit workforce agility, or allow it and accept security risk.monday.com proved there’s a better path—one that preserves security, user experience, and agility.
As active members of Israel’s IT leadership community, monday.com shares these results with peers facing similar challenges.
The last mile of identity does not need to be a gap. With Cerby, it becomes a competitive advantage.