Dissecting The Types Of Cloud Apps That Enterprises Use

Cloud-based apps are becoming increasingly prevalent in businesses. Identify management software vendor Okta recently took a closer look at the enterprise cloud apps landscape to find out just what types of apps businesses are deploying and how they are using them. Here are the results.

Business apps image from Shutterstock

Okta has released its Business @ Work report, which looks at the cloud-based apps that organisations use in order to reveal productivity trends driven by digital technology. To do this, Okta anonymised the data of thousands of customers that log into apps using its identity and mobility management software and analysed the information.

What the company found was that the average enterprise, regardless of size, uses around 10 to 16 apps regularly. Here are the five of the most popular cloud apps used by enterprises, according to the Okta report:

1. Microsoft Office 365
2. Salesforce
3. Box
4. Google Apps
5. Amazon Web Services

While collaboration tool Slack was ranked 12th on the list, it was the fastest growing cloud app among Okta customers in the second half of 2015, seeing a 77 per cent increase in adoption. Microsoft Azure is the fourth fastest growing app with a 46 per cent boost in adoption in the second half of last year.

The Business @ Work report also found a large number of customers were using both Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps in their organisations; 40 per cent, to be exact. While they are effectively competing offerings, different departments within a business prefer to cherry pick different applications from both productivity suites. Around 30 per cent of customers that do use Office 365 and Google Apps together prefer Microsoft’s desktop tools (such as Word and Excel) while favouring Google’s suite for day-to-day email and collaboration.

Enterprises continue to be concerned about security for the their apps they use. Around 90 per cent of Okta customers have at least one Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)-enabled apps and 40 per cent have enable automatic deprovisioning of apps. Nearly 30 per cent have multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled on their apps with a security question being the most popular method for MFA.

An interesting finding of the Business @ Work report is the penetration rates for different types of apps and how they differ from region to region. While HR and expense management apps are used by close to half of organisations in North America, the penetration rates in Asia-Pacific are much lower.

You can read more about the results of the Business @ Work report over at Okta’s website.
[Via Business @ Work]