It’s Business Time: Introducing Okta’s "Businesses @ Work" Report
Todd McKinnon August 20, 2015
Work is happening everywhere, and Okta has a unique vantage point into the cloud and mobile apps and services that organizations are choosing to help their employees, customers and partners be more flexible and productive. That’s why we’re releasing our first-ever "Businesses @ Work" Report, which shares findings from our network of 4,000 applications, thousands of custom integrations and millions of daily authentications and verifications around the world.
After analyzing Okta’s dataset, we’ve identified a few industry trends that might be helpful for those making (or considering) significant investments in cloud and mobile. We hope you find it as interesting as we do.
Here are some highlights:
Apps can rise in popularity just as fast as they can fall. It’s more important than ever to deliver constant value to users, otherwise, they’ll abandon you as soon as something newer and better enters the market. Certain services have maintained early leadership positions – including Salesforce.com, AWS and Box – but others have lost ground to competition. Google Apps has come a long way in the past few years, but it now trails Office 365 in almost every category. And Slack has come on strong, increasing usership 50% in Q2 2015.
Traditional security questions like “What’s your mother’s maiden name?” are on the decline as a form of verification. New forms of authentication like push notifications on phones and watches have become more popular. And innovation is happening quickly – we predict even more movement on this front. Moving forward, we believe biometrics will be the next big factor that businesses layer into security practices.
SAML is finally the security standard it set out to be. As companies put a premium on security, developers are increasingly building apps with SAML enabled from the start. It used to take months to build in SAML capabilities, but in the last couple years, cloud services have made it easier for ISVs and app developers to automate key exchanges, key management and libraries.
The big takeaway? It’s business time for cloud and mobile – and as business computing happens everywhere, companies are taking steps to equip their employees, partners and customers with the right tools to be productive and secure.
To learn more, check out our full "Businesses @ Work" Report at okta.com/Businesses-At-Work/2015-08. And share your thoughts with us @Okta with the hashtag #BusinessesAtWork.