Businesses @ Work: This Time It’s Personal, and Even a Little Political

Today, we released our third Businesses @ Work report, which takes an in-depth look into the current state of apps and services organizations and people use to be productive at work. When we launched our inaugural Businesses @ Work report in August 2015, we closely examined what tools people were using at work, in the context of organizations moving to cloud and mobile. We’re still witnessing that transformation today, and the number of tools and technologies employees use in the office continues to increase.

But we’re also starting to witness a change in how people work.

One of the most surprising findings in our report is people are using Okta to secure more than just corporate apps and data. Our data showed 56 percent of apps used by Okta customers today are not provided by IT, up from 48 percent last year. LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and PayPal lead the pack of those personal apps.

The lines between work and personal identities are clearly blurring. The increasing use of personal apps and devices at work used to be a major corporate battleground, but IT is now starting to embrace a more employee-friendly approach.

Additional key findings include:

The fastest growing app is also one you’ve probably never heard of — until this week. Video conferencing solution and Sequoia's latest investment recipient Zoom became the fastest growing app on our platform, growing 67 percent over the last six months. Zoom wasn’t even in our top 25 in our last report, which shows how quickly the landscape can change. If you’re wondering whether this matters, keep in mind last year’s fastest-growing app was Slack

Speaking of Slack...The collaboration leader is still growing fast, coming in third with 44 percent growth. What’s more interesting is the app’s impact on other messaging apps, adoption of which has largely been on the decline throughout 2016.

Real unicorns are highly adopted, not just highly valued. The reputation of private software companies hinges too much on valuation, and not enough on enterprise adoption or utilization. We took it upon ourselves to redefine what a unicorn is. We identified the 10 most popular private enterprise software companies based on the number of customers using these apps. Slack is number one, followed by Dropbox, DocuSign, GitHub, and Smartsheet.

G Suite customers are in a league of their own. Our G Suite customers could be considered more cloud friendly than our Office 365 customers, using 30 percent more apps on average (29 apps compared to 22), but they are also more likely to use best-of-breed solutions. This includes Salesforce, Slack, AWS and GitHub, and a tendency to adopt apps that are more customizable in nature.

Red versus Blue. Our country is more politically divided than ever before, even when it comes to the types of apps red states versus blue states prefer to use. Our data shows that blue states, on average, use more apps (22) than both red (18.5) and swing (18) states. Not only that, but blue states also tend to be more cloud-forward than red and swing states, with higher adoption of Box, ADP, G Suite, JIRA, Slack, Zendesk and others.

Digital transformation and the future of work. As we reported in our 2016 Businesses @ Work report, the number of external identities surpassed internal identities for the first time, and external identities continued to grow through 2016, increasing by 540 percent. The distinction between internal and external identities is fading, which is why businesses need a foundation for secure connections between people and technology — whether their people are employees, contractors, partners or suppliers, and no matter what kind of technology they’re using at work. A foundation, like the Okta Identity Cloud, will enable this digital transformation.

Look for additional data in future installments of our Businesses @ Work report, and view the report in its entirety here.