Businesses at Work

When we break out our most popular apps by region, we find some striking differences. At the top of our ranks, we see that the new second-place global rank for AWS is driven by its strong growth in EMEA and APAC, where it has seen over 25% growth since April, 2020, compared to 16% growth in North America during the same time period. 

For many apps, their popularity in North America drives their rank on the charts. Salesforce and Zoom’s global ranks are underpinned by their popularity in North America: each ranks two spots lower in APAC and three spots lower in EMEA. 

But some apps find their sweet spots outside of North America. While the Atlassian Product Suite (headquartered in Sydney, Australia) ranks sixth on our global list and in North America, it ranks third in EMEA and APAC, beating out such popular tools as Salesforce and Google Workspace. Other examples of higher rankings in EMEA include Slack (1 spot higher than in North America), Zendesk (6 spots higher), and GitHub (4 spots higher). 

Some apps that don’t appear in our global rankings make cameo appearances in regional breakdowns. Social media giant Twitter left our global top apps in 2017, but in EMEA, Twitter still sits in the top 15. Jamf Pro, our #1 fastest growing app in 2018 and a recurring fastest growing app through 2020, appears in the EMEA top 15. And APAC customers’ deployment puts ServiceNow (IT service management support), Mimecast (email security), Xero (small business accounting, headquartered in Wellington, NZ), and Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect (network security) into APAC’s top 15. 

Popularity by active unique users looks at which apps are being adopted by the most users across organizations. Each year this chart sees seasonal dips around the winter holidays as users log off, but this year we also see the dramatic impacts of quarantine and shelter in place orders. Over the span of nine weeks, starting in mid-March 2020, more than 38 million Americans filed for unemployment across the country. Employees across industries were furloughed or laid off, and app usage data reflects that. Looking at our top app, for example, we see that 57% of Okta customers with Microsoft 365 had a decrease in unique users in April. 

Many top apps, such as Microsoft 365, Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Zscaler, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Slack, showed a noticeable dip in user activity after March 31, 2020, all reaching a turning point at the end of May. By the end of July, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Cornerstone OnDemand monthly unique user levels had rebounded to equal or higher levels of use, and by the end of August, Workday, ServiceNow, and Zscaler rebounded as well. Slack recovered by the end of September.

Two tools notably thrived during this period. Zoom, which had only joined the top apps by unique users for the first time in 2019, ended this current data period in sixth place. In our Businesses at Work (from Home) report in April, when we highlighted apps that had seen significant growth in numbers of corporate and personal users in March, Zoom was our fastest growing app by number of unique users. While unique users dipped a bit over summer, by the end of September they were reaching new highs, likely related to Zoom’s extensive efforts to support distance learning. 

Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect also thrived. As companies rushed to protect their remote workers with secure remote access, it joined the top ranks by unique users for the first time. It was the second fastest growing tool by number of unique users in our supplemental April report: GlobalProtect usage climbed over 230% in late March when compared to 28 days prior, and has only continued to rise.

The platform effect

Apps secure a solid foothold at the top

Some of the apps Okta connects to serve as platforms in their own right: moving beyond specific functionality, companies can build on top of these platforms, integrating their functionality into other systems, and even baking the platform’s underlying technology into the company’s own app stack. These platforms become a core, integral part of the company’s operating technology and would be expensive and cumbersome to replace. They have long-term staying power because they are so intertwined with how business gets done.

How do platforms rank among our customers’ app usage? Since our first report in 2015, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace have held three of our top four spots. They may have rebranded once or twice, but they are embedded in our desktops and our work lives. Since 2015, AWS has improved its global rank by number of customers from #6 to #2. And Atlassian, ranked #6 globally by number of customers, has built a pervasive platform for developers. Network effects amplify the staying power of these platforms, making it easier to adopt and integrate new pieces of technology to solve evolving problems.

This year has been an anomaly for so many reasons, and that’s reflected in the record-setting turnover in our fastest growing apps and integrations. For the first time, 90% of our fastest growing apps are brand new to the top 10. 

While we always expect frequent turnover — it’s tough to maintain explosive rates of growth over multiple years — we see a shift in the type of apps that customers are adopting. Last year we noted that collaboration apps were being replaced by data- or security-focused tools. This year companies needed to enable remote work, which meant supporting at-home workspaces and virtual collaboration, as well as helping employees thrive as they work apart from one another. 

While collaboration tools have rejoined the fastest growing ranks, companies continue to invest in security tools as well: for the first time, security tools claim four out of the top ten spots.

The average number of apps deployed per customer has risen steadily across all industries and company sizes, for a combined growth of 22% over the past four years. This year, the average number of apps per customer remains at 88.

We broke that out by customer size and found that our largest customers are adopting more apps than our smaller customers. Our larger customers, with 2,000 or more employees, deploy an average of 175 apps per customer, while our smaller customers, with 1,999 or fewer employees, deploy an average of 73 apps per customer.

New customers tend to initially deploy fewer apps through the OIN, then add more over time. Customers who have been with Okta for less than a year adopt an average of 23 apps. That number increases to 55 apps between one to two years, and 101 apps between two to four years. This year we see that customers who have been with Okta for four years or more deploy an average of 207 apps, an increase of 9% over the previous year. At the high end of the app deployment scale, 10% of our customers deploy 199 apps or more.

When we break out app deployment by industry, it makes sense to see technology companies at the high end of the spectrum. These organisations live, breathe, and even build the tools they are using. In the past three years, their average number of apps has increased 57% from 99 to 155, with 17% growth in the past year.

Other sectors have seen significant growth in app adoption as well. Over the past four years, the government sector has had the largest increase in average app deployment at 140%, which includes a 43% jump in the past year alone — the largest increase in any sector in the past year. Remote work has driven governments to deploy a wide range of apps and tools that were previously a much lower priority, if not completely unnecessary. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly Current Population Survey consistently found public-sector employees working remotely at a higher-than-average rate: 57% of government employees worked remotely in May, which dropped steadily to 34% in September, compared to the entire economy, where 35% worked remotely in May, dropping to 23% in September.

The education sector ranks high in app deployment, with more tempered growth. While their average app deployment trend line has increased over the past few years, they did see a dip down to an average of 119 apps per customer in 2019. However, in 2020 the education sector’s average number of apps rose 6% year over year, possibly as they ramped up to provide remote learning.

Some of the other industries seeing large increases in average app adoption this year include professional services (36% increase), healthcare and pharmaceuticals (19% increase), and finance and banking (18% increase). Retail average app deployment grew 7% in the past year, but 58% over the past four years.

Best of breed rules, incumbents drool

As employees settle into remote work, it’s critical they have the best tools to keep them connected and working productively. When it comes to interacting with co-workers, customers, partners, vendors, and others on a common platform, we see that for many companies, a “good enough” solution isn’t actually good enough. We’re seeing that “one size fits all” is not fitting, at all.

Over the past few years, we have looked at whether companies that invest in the Microsoft 365 suite — the most popular app in our network — are finding it meets all their needs. We also wonder if deploying Microsoft 365 means customers commit to an exclusively Microsoft environment. The answer to both questions is decisively “no.” While the Microsoft 365 suite offers basic personal productivity, communication, collaboration, and content management tools, Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers continue to invest in many other best-of-breed apps. And when they need CRM software, project management tools, data visualisation software, or cloud platforms, they look for bestof- breed options as well. Over the past five years, the number of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers deploying at least one best of breed app has increased by seven percentage points.

Like the strictly-controlled French designations of “champagne” or “cognac,” “best of breed” is a distinction we don’t take lightly. Best-of-breed apps dominate their category for the standalone functionality they provide. This year, best-of-breed tools Salesforce, AWS, Box, Slack, and Zoom are joined by project management tool Smartsheet and data visualisation tool Tableau, which compete against Microsoft Project and Power BI, respectively.

Microsoft Teams comes standard with the Microsoft 365 Business Basic subscription, but during a global shift to video meetings, video classes, and video cocktail hours, companies increasingly dialled in to Zoom. Over 42% of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers now also deploy Zoom, a jump of more than 10 percentage points over the previous year. (This number has increased nearly 35 percentage points in the past four years.) And when it comes to chatting, Slack is also part of the conversation. The rate of increase has slowed, but this year nearly 32% of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers also deploy Slack. And, while they most certainly have access to OneDrive, a standard feature in even the most basic Microsoft 365 bundle, 26% also deploy Box.

Overall, Segment sees that the average number of apps businesses are connecting to their CDP has risen to 11, up from eight last year. As businesses further embrace digital operations on the back of COVID-19, their tech stacks are becoming populated with more and more software.

Diving deeper into the types of apps being adopted on Segment’s customer data platform, we can get an in-depth view of how the SaaS market is evolving.

Analytics apps remain the #1 category on the Segment platform. As 2020 drives more customers into digital experiences, it’s having a second order effect on marketing technology adoption, driving more and more businesses into analytics apps.

Meanwhile, digital advertising tools rose to #2 this year, up from #3 in the same period last year, reinforcing the hypothesis reported in Segment’s COVID Tech Stacks Report — businesses are going all in on advertising tools to match consumer behaviour.³

Finally, there is growing adoption of what can be broadly categorised as customer engagement tools. Based on Segment’s data, customer success, email marketing, and heatmaps/ recording tools all saw increased adoption in the region of 18- 25%, indicating that many companies are continuing to lean into digital engagement and transformation efforts, despite the uncertain economic circumstances.

The most popular apps by category

The user experience is critical for workforce apps as well. All the most popular tools across our categories delivered amazing digital experiences during the pandemic, and that's why they're winning.

When we delve into our data, we sort categories in two ways. For some workforce-focused categories, such as collaboration apps, developer tools, HR platforms, and video conferencing apps, we look specifically at tools that have been deployed at a company-wide level for corporate use.

Increasingly, however, our work lives and our personal lives intersect. For certain categories, such as travel, health and wellness, and philanthropic efforts, we expand our lens to include apps that employees adopt personally through Okta, in addition to those assigned by their IT teams.

Taking care of business: apps deployed company-wide

As COVID-19 spread rapidly in the spring of 2020 and an unprecedented half of the world’s population, nearly four billion people, went into lockdown, companies quickly deployed new tools to enable employees to work remotely. Collaboration tools come in every size, color, and flavour, but sometimes having too many options can be overwhelming. What do our customers choose for specific collaboration needs? These tools easily walk away with top honours for their specific functionality. This year gave rise to the latest tech stack everyone needs to support a new way of working.

Remote Work Stack

Highlights of our remote work stack:

• Deployment of project management app Smartsheet has grown 170% over the past three years. It boasts around 1.5 times as many Okta customers as its nearest competitor, Asana.
• Box is the top file sharing app, with 59% more Okta customers than its nearest competitor, Dropbox.
• DocuSign is far and away the most popular option for electronic signatures. Deployment has grown 208% in the past three years, and nearly 49% in the past year alone as digital signatures became critical to completing all kinds of transactions. DocuSign has more than seven times as many Okta customers as second-place Adobe Document Cloud.
• Top surveying tool SurveyMonkey has seen nearly 13% growth since February 2020, as companies rushed to understand what their employees needed to work remotely. SurveyMonkey has more than three times as many Okta customers as secondplace Typeform.
• Slack ranks clearly as the top messaging tool, with nearly 190% growth in the past three years. Slack has more than ten times as many Okta customers as the second most popular messaging app, Workplace by Facebook.
• Lucidchart is by far the most popular app for diagramming and wireframing. It has enjoyed 239% growth over the past three years, and has ranked as one of our top apps by unique users for the past two years. Lucidchart has nearly three times as many Okta customers as competitor InVision, and four times as many as our third fastest growing app, Figma.
• The most popular note taking app, Evernote, has seen a rise and fall in popularity, and now has the same number of Okta customers it did three years ago. We’ll keep our eye on competitor Notion, which is rising rapidly through the ranks.

Within days of pandemic lockdowns around the world, use of video conferencing apps skyrocketed, as detailed in our spring supplemental report, Businesses at Work (from Home). Looking at the number of customers, we see a strong inflection point between February and March for both Zoom and Cisco Webex. Deployment of Zoom grew over 45% between March and October, while Webex grew 15% and RingCentral grew 18% during this same period. But 2020 will be remembered as the “year Zoom became a household name.” For the first time, the app became part of many people’s daily lives. Days of Zoom meetings and Zoom classes were capped by evenings of Zoom cocktail hours and Zoom dinners, until “video conferencing fatigue” became a thing.

It’s interesting to contrast the number of customers versus the number of active unique users of competitive apps. While Zoom had more customers than Webex as of February 2018, Zoom had less active unique users than Webex until March 2020, at which point Zoom’s unique user growth rapidly passed Webex and remained higher.

While this year gave remote work a dramatic boost, we think the future of work is dynamic. This translates to a global workforce, in widely distributed locations, working wherever, whenever, and however they want. Gartner predicts "48% of employees at large enterprises will work remotely at least some of the time after the pandemic, a significant increase over the 30% of employees who worked remotely at least some of the time prior to the pandemic.”⁵ Now more than ever, HR departments need a robust set of tools to keep managers and teams connected, support distributed workers, and ensure every employee feels valued.

While HR tools have grown again across the board, employee engagement tools have made especially large gains. With 75% growth in the past year, Culture Amp jumped two spots to pass SAP SuccessFactors and claim fourth place. Lattice, our sixth fastest growing app overall with 109% year-over-year growth, joined the top HR tools for the first time and rose quickly to seventh place.

Large, end-to-end human resources tools continue to attract new customers. Reigning top app Workday has held a solid lead among HR tools with 23% year-over-year growth. Second-place BambooHR has seen more substantial growth, at 38%.

_{[5] Gartner, “9 Predictions for the Post-COVID Future of Work,” May 14, 2020.}

The balancing act of life and work: corporate + personal app adoption

By the end of 2020, we were marvelling at the layer of dust on our passports and the length of time between our trips to the gas station. Our “big outings” had become dog walks in new parts of town. Most people weren’t getting on a plane unless they absolutely had to. It’s no surprise that the number of airline passengers tanked year over year. Compared to the same month the prior year, there was a -51% change in March, and a whopping -96% change in April, with only small upticks by summer. Our lives seemed frozen in place, and corporate and personal adoption of travel apps generally froze as well. In fact, the ranked order of our hotel and lodging apps stayed exactly the same as last year.

For most of our top hotel and lodging apps, growth was measured in the fractions of percentages, or negative numbers. Bonvoy (the combined rewards program which includes Marriott and Starwood hotels) measured -1% year over year, Hilton Hotels grew 3%, and Hyatt Hotels gained less than 1%.

There was one standout exception in this field. For travellers who ventured out, the option of a private living room won out over a chic hotel lobby, and a private kitchen was more appealing than the all-you-care-to-eat breakfast buffet. Use of popular travel alternative Airbnb saw nearly 11% growth year over year, including 3% growth since the end of February.

Health and wellness meant one thing to us in January when we made our New Year’s resolutions and looked forward to the new decade with eager anticipation. By the end of March the year wasn’t turning out the way we had expected, and health and wellness took on a whole new meaning altogether. Around the world, many workers who were fortunate enough to still have jobs were trying to figure out how to work from home, while some became impromptu school teachers for their children. During this incredibly stressful time, a dedicated few were inspired to turn to exercise to improve their overall well-being, or just to get outside.

Which were more powerful drivers for personal health and wellness: New Year’s resolutions, or pandemic resolutions? It seems we were more collectively focused on January 1. Our gold medal health and wellness app, Fitbit, saw nearly 5% growth in January 2020, compared to 3% growth in April. (Overall, the app saw over 21% growth in 2020.) Growth of silver medal MyFitnessPal was 3% in January, but nearly flat in April. Bronze medal app Strava grew nearly 4% in January, and another 3% in April.

Remember how many of us showed off our homemade sourdough successes (and fails) last spring on Instagram? Well, after more than two months of shelter in place, our kitchen ambitions caught up with us. The surge in WW (formerly Weightwatchers) tipped the scales at over 7% growth over the months of June and July, a bit shy of their 11% growth in January.

Most popular factors

This past year, like never before, we have lived the concept of collective responsibility for our shared well-being. In our physical world, that has meant mask wearing, hand washing, and deciding whether or not we saw our family and friends over the holidays. In our work lives, as many people moved to remote work for the first time, that has meant adopting security measures to protect employees, and critical company data.

Proofpoint’s State of the Phish report, released in January 2020, makes it clear that IT managers had quite the job ahead of them as employees moved to remote work.While 95% of survey respondents said they use a smartphone, 10% had no lock on their device. 95% of global workers surveyed had home Wi-Fi networks, yet only 49% password-protect their network, and 11% said they find Wi-Fi security measures too time-consuming and/or inconvenient to implement.⁷ (IT managers, please take a moment to breathe…)

Of course, hackers never let a good crisis go to waste. F5’s 2020 Phishing and Fraud Report saw a 220% increase in phishing attacks during the pandemic compared to the yearly average, with large spikes in phishing activities that closely coincided with lockdown rules and used “covid” or “coronavirus” in their subject lines. And where are employees most vulnerable? F5 warns that the login page of our most popular app, Microsoft 365, is one of the most popular targets for generic phishing because “attackers know that stealing Office 365 credentials can grant them access not only to email but also corporate documents, finance, HR, and many other critical business functions.”⁸

Okta customers are stepping up to the challenge. They are deploying multiple factors in addition to, or instead of, passwords, and they are choosing stronger factors.

_{[7] Proofpoint, “2020 State of the Phish Report,” January 23, 2020.}

_{[8] F5, "2020 Phishing and Fraud Report,” November 11, 2020.}

Digging into MFA, we see that, compared to traditional brittle forms of authentication (i.e., simple two-factor methods), higher assurance factors are on the rise. Consumers and services are moving to adaptive forms of authentication, such as Okta Verify. Of customers authenticating to Okta with a factor in addition to, or instead of a password, we see that use of Okta Verify (including Okta Verify with Push notifications) is on the rise, from 78% last year to 82% today.

Once again we see weaker factors such as SMS and security questions on the decline. SMS as a factor has dropped from 53% two years ago to 49% today. Security questions have dropped from 18% two years ago to 15% today.

In March, 2019, W3C made a recommendation for Web Authentication (FIDO 2.0) as a simpler, stronger authentication. In October 2019, the new MacOS Catalina 10.15 included Safari 13 by default; it was the first version of Safari to support WebAuthentication (WebAuthn). From that point on, any new Mac sales or OS upgrades supported WebAuthn. WebAuthn has been maturing quickly as overall security awareness improves. Since the fall of 2019, we have seen a steady increase in WebAuthn, matched by a proportionate decrease in U2F (FIDO 1.0).

When Fortinet conducted a global survey of IT decision makers in June 2020 for their Remote Workforce Cybersecurity Report, they asked respondents where they were planning to make new investments. The largest group (30%) chose MFA.⁹ Companies have their sights set on protecting their workforces.

_{[9] Fortinet, “2020 Remote Workforce Cybersecurity Report: Enterprises Must Adapt to Address Telework Security Challenges,” August 19, 2020.}

With identity-related attacks increasing, organizations are continuously evaluating how to optimize the security policies in their environment. In late 2019, Okta ThreatInsight — a baseline security feature which helps organizations secure themselves against large scale identity attacks, especially attacks which target passwords — became generally available. ThreatInsight is a component of Okta’s risk engine and security intelligence, in which login patterns are analyzed to enable secure access decisions. When Okta identifies password spray and brute force across all customers, those IPs are added to the ThreatInsight database. Organizations can then choose to block access from those IP addresses. ThreatInsight allows organizations to secure their business before becoming the victim of an identity attack.

Not every organization experiences a large volume of attacks. ThreatInsight protection is like insurance. With the average cost of a data breach now estimated at $3.86 million in IBM’s 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report, this is an insurance policy well worth enabling.¹⁰

Detected threats include password spray and login failures. Password spraying is a variant of a brute force attack, where an attacker gets past the usual security measures by “spraying” the same password across many accounts before trying another one. Login failures are flagged when too many failures happen within a short period of time. When we see password spray or numerous login failures coming from an IP address, we flag that IP address as suspicious.

The number of authentications has risen steadily over the past six months; meanwhile the overall growth of detected threats have been less consistent, but the trend line shows a significant increase in the late summer and fall.

_{[10] IBM, “2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report,” July 2020.}