Executive summary
In this Element Technologies case study, learn how a law-firm-focused MSP standardized Okta delivery—and cut new-tenant setup time with ZeroConfig.
Element Technologies, LLC is a mature, process-driven managed services provider (MSP) serving primarily law firms. As Element scaled Okta across dozens of customer environments, the team wanted a consistent, repeatable way to deploy a strong identity baseline instead of repetitive manual processes relying on detailed per-client documentation.
With ZeroTek, Element centralized administration across every Okta client, accelerated enablement for new engineers, and leaned on ZeroTek’s responsive, Okta-fluent support to ensure success in more complex scenarios. With early access to the ZeroConfig feature, they standardized their baseline Okta configuration and reduced the time required to stand up a new Okta tenant—while also creating a foundation for ongoing drift monitoring and scalable automation.
This made it easier for Element to deliver robust, consistent identity protections to law firms, helping clients stay resilient against credential-based attacks.
“ZeroTek makes it possible to deliver Okta to our clients, by a growing engineering team, with consistent outcomes.”
– Kyle Falany, Site Reliability Engineer, Element
The situation: scaling identity for law firms without scaling complexity
Element’s engineers are deeply familiar with the IT realities of modern law firms, which often include a mix of hybrid environments, legacy infrastructure, compliance pressure, and high expectations for responsiveness. In practice, that means Element has to reduce identity friction for end users without relaxing controls—because for law firms, a compromised identity can quickly become a client-impacting incident.
Many law firms still run on legacy configurations, and updating them requires a careful, deliberate approach—both to avoid introducing risk and to strengthen security against today’s evolving threats.
At the same time, Element’s internal model is built around standardization and repeatability whenever possible: define a best-practices tech stack, deploy it consistently, and then operate with excellence at scale.
Back in 2021, Element Technologies discovered Okta delivered through ZeroTek was a natural fit. Element had moved beyond “just MFA” and was looking for ways to standardize on a more comprehensive identity security layer across Microsoft 365, NetDocuments, VPN access, and line-of-business apps. For Element’s clients, that shift wasn’t just a technology upgrade—it was a move toward a more defensible access layer across the apps users touch every day.
“ZeroTek makes it possible to deliver Okta to our clients, by a growing engineering team, with consistent outcomes.” says Kyle Falany, Site Reliability Engineer at Element. That’s the heart of the partnership: ZeroTek makes it easy for MSPs like Element to manage all customers’ identity environments from a single platform and deploy standardized Okta configurations quickly.
What changed for Element after adopting ZeroTek | Okta
The benefits of working with ZeroTek | Okta fall in roughly four categories: admin improvements, technical support, operational efficiencies, and the ability to consistently win clients.
A more approachable admin experience
Okta is powerful, but it can be a steep learning curve for engineers who haven’t lived in it before. Element’s team emphasized that ZeroTek made Okta administration more approachable for day-to-day operations—especially when speed and clarity matter. “For an MSP, usability matters, and ZeroTek makes our day-to-day Okta administration significantly easier and more efficient. It’s where we do most of our work,” explains Kyle.
For clients, that operational simplicity matters: when access needs to be tightened, a user needs to be secured quickly, or an onboarding needs to be done right away, Element can act fast without introducing inconsistency.
This aligns with ZeroTek’s positioning: simplify delivery and ongoing administration of Okta so MSP teams can operate efficiently without getting bogged down in enterprise-grade complexities.
Faster learning through high-quality, MSP-aware support
Element points to ZeroTek’s technical support as another key differentiator. Kyle puts it plainly, “With a platform as powerful as Okta, you can be a cowboy, try to figure it out on your own, and hope you get it right. And sure, Okta docs and training will help you understand the tech. But when you’re delivering it at scale as your core identity security layer to multiple clients—Okta’s support just isn’t geared for that.”
In contrast, “ZeroTek Support really gets it. It’s so clear they’re familiar with so many different scenarios and have rigorously tested everything. They’ve saved us so much time, rapidly getting us to the level that we could deliver high caliber IAM efficiently. They don’t just give you ‘how-to’ instructions. It’s full knowledge transfer.”
That rigor shows up in client outcomes: smooth rollouts, edge cases identified and addressed, and more confidence that the identity layer is doing what it’s supposed to do—consistently, across tenants.
“Last year, we sent one guy on the ZeroTek support team a trophy in the mail,” says Kyle. “He’d just consistently gone above and beyond to make sure a couple of important deployments went off without a hitch, and made sure our team was completely up to speed. ZeroTek’s technical support is the best I’ve experienced.”
“Last year, we sent one guy on the ZeroTek support team a trophy in the mail. [Their] technical support is the best I’ve experienced.”
– Kyle Falany, Site Reliability Engineer, Element
Billing automation for easy, coherent client billing
Element also highly values ZeroTek’s billing consolidation and automation into ConnectWise. “It’s the best billing automation setup I’ve encountered from a vendor. It completely eliminates tedious manual reconciliation for all our Okta-based billing,” explains Brian Fladebo, VP Service Delivery.
Brian contrasts this with the reality of many vendor billing models, where invoices arrive with little context and teams are left to review, verify, and sometimes manually input the numbers. With ZeroTek, license consumption changes are accurate, clearly enumerated, and automatically synced to ConnectWise. As Brian puts it, “That simplicity is unmatched.”
“[ZeroTek has] the best billing automation setup I’ve encountered from a vendor.”
– Brian Fladebo, VP Service Delivery, Element
Modernization that turns projects into long-term partnerships
Element’s legal focus means they routinely inherit environments that still depend on on-prem infrastructure—legacy servers, hybrid identity, and systems that weren’t designed for today’s security and compliance expectations. Many engagements begin as a one-time modernization project, often tied to Element’s enterprise content management (ECM) expertise and NetDocuments migrations, and then expand into broader security and infrastructure work: decommissioning servers, tightening access controls, and standardizing identity with Okta delivered through ZeroTek.
Kyle describes how these engagements often begin as a project and then convert into ongoing managed services once clients experience Element’s execution first-hand: “It’s not unusual to come to us for an ECM migration and end up managed service clients. The conversations we have doing IT project work like decommissioning servers leads to setting up Okta, Intune, the rest of our stack.”
As part of that modernization, Element prefers moving firms toward Okta-sourced identity when feasible—so authentication isn’t coupled to local infrastructure availability. “When identities are all sourced and authenticated through Okta, it’s better security and a better experience. You never have to worry about getting that AD server back up.”
“With ZeroConfig, the playbook is: create the Okta org in ZeroTek, assign the baseline template, run ZeroConfig, go set up the branding—you’re done. In under an hour.”
– Kyle Falany, Site Reliability Engineer, Element
Enter ZeroConfig: standardizing Okta tenant setup in minutes
Element’s early access use case for ZeroConfig was clear: new Okta tenant setups—standardize the security baseline and stop repeating the same steps every time. For clients, that repeatability means the identity foundation is exactly as designed by Element’s top engineers. It’s predictable, reviewable, and consistent across environments.
From Element’s perspective, ZeroConfig turns what used to be a careful, multi-step build into a controlled, template-driven workflow—so engineers spend less time recreating settings and more time on the few client-specific decisions that are truly bespoke. Dom Peterson, Systems Integration Specialist, summarized the value from an operator’s perspective: “Being able to automate complex configurations—it’s huge.”
Kyle explains, “Before ZeroConfig, we could have multiple clients with the same baseline security setup—but we needed per-client documentation to capture all the tiny discrepancies that come with manual work: someone spells the name of this group with a dash, another uses a space. But with ZeroConfig, the playbook is: create the Okta org in ZeroTek, assign the baseline template, run ZeroConfig, go set up the branding—you’re done. In under an hour.”
“It’s a genius system,” says Jeff Regan, Senior Engineer at Element. “It really only leaves a few truly client-specific steps as manual work.”
Element’s early access use case for ZeroConfig was clear: new Okta tenant setups—standardize the security baseline and stop repeating the same steps every time. For clients, that repeatability means the identity foundation is exactly as designed by Element’s top engineers. It’s predictable, reviewable, and consistent across environments.
From Element’s perspective, ZeroConfig turns what used to be a careful, multi-step build into a controlled, template-driven workflow—so engineers spend less time recreating settings and more time on the few client-specific decisions that are truly bespoke. Dom Peterson, Systems Integration Specialist, summarized the value from an operator’s perspective: “Being able to automate complex configurations—it’s huge.”
Kyle explains, “Before ZeroConfig, we could have multiple clients with the same baseline security setup—but we needed per-client documentation to capture all the tiny discrepancies that come with manual work: someone spells the name of this group with a dash, another uses a space. But with ZeroConfig, the playbook is: create the Okta org in ZeroTek, assign the baseline template, run ZeroConfig, go set up the branding—you’re done. In under an hour.” (Kyle notes the ZeroConfig segment reduces an hour and half of work to about 25 minutes.)
“It’s a genius system,” says Jeff Regan, Senior Engineer at Element. “It really only leaves a few truly client-specific steps as manual work.”
“Transparency with our clients is really important around here.
So we really like that ZeroConfig makes it so easy to show clients exactly what’s changing before we make the changes.”
– Jeff Regan, Senior Engineer, Element
Beyond deployment: a foundation for drift monitoring and scalable automation
While Element’s initial use case was new tenant setup, the team points to ZeroConfig’s longer term operational advantage: preventing configuration drift and enabling cross-tenant consistency—especially as teams change, responsibilities shift, and environments evolve. That matters because drift is where identity risk quietly creeps in—small changes accumulate, exceptions multiply, and firms lose the consistency that makes access controls defensible.
Kyle provided a concrete example: “Say we build an automation to speed things up and enhance security for our clients. If the target group has exactly the same name and is configured exactly the same way across clients, our automation doesn’t need to be customized for each tenant. It’s faster and more robust.”
“Transparency with our clients is really important around here. So we really like that ZeroConfig makes it so easy to show clients exactly what’s changing before we make the changes,” says Jeff.
While Element’s initial use case was new tenant setup, the team points to ZeroConfig’s longer term operational advantage: preventing configuration drift and enabling cross-tenant consistency—especially as teams change, responsibilities shift, and environments evolve. That matters because drift is where identity risk quietly creeps in—small changes accumulate, exceptions multiply, and firms lose the consistency that makes access controls defensible.
Kyle provided a concrete example: “Say we build an automation to speed things up and enhance security for our clients. If the target group has exactly the same name and is configured exactly the same way across clients, our automation doesn’t need to be customized for each tenant. It’s faster and more robust.”
“Transparency with our clients is really important around here. So we really like that ZeroConfig makes it so easy to show clients exactly what’s changing before we make the changes,” says Jeff.
What this enables for Element and their clients
Element’s team is clear about where this goes next:
- Repeatable security baselines for every new Okta tenant
- Faster onboarding and enablement for engineers new to Okta administration
- Less time in the weeds—more time delivering higher-value outcomes for clients
- Cleaner operations at scale, including opportunities for ongoing drift reporting and bulk configuration updates over time
- More consistent identity controls that help reduce account takeover risk across critical apps
- Clearer, faster change conversations with co-managed IT teams—so clients understand exactly what’s changing and why
For law firms, that combination of consistency and visibility translates into real-world confidence: access controls are easier to defend, exceptions are easier to identify and accommodate, and access changes don’t trigger a scramble when auditors, insurers, or key clients ask questions. And for any organization with high security or regulatory requirements, it adds up to the outcome that matters most—reduced exposure to identity-based threats, delivered with rigor.
With ZeroTek and ZeroConfig, Element delivers Okta with confidence and operational clarity, keeping their clients secure and compliant as they grow. For those evaluating a law firm MSP, this is what mature identity security delivery looks like in practice.
“When identities are all sourced and authenticated through Okta, it’s better security and a better experience.”
– Kyle Falany, Site Reliability Engineer, Element
About Element Technologies, LLC
Element Technologies brings more than 200 years of combined experience to every engagement, delivering what clients need—when they need it. Security is central to Element’s identity and the foundation of every service and project the team delivers. Every initiative begins with protecting client assets and culminates in world-class security that strengthens business continuity and day-to-day operations.
Element Technologies, LLC brings more than 200 years of combined experience to every engagement, delivering what clients need—when they need it. Security is central to Element’s identity and the foundation of every service and project the team delivers. Every initiative begins with protecting client assets and culminates in world-class security that strengthens business continuity and day-to-day operations.
