2015

Okta's Businesses @ Work Report

An in-depth look into how organizations and people work today—exploring employees, partners, contractors and customers, and the apps and services they use to be productive.

Business computing is happening everywhere, at our desks, at home, on mobile devices, in watches and cars, and work is transforming rapidly because of it. Organizations—regardless of size, industry and location—are taking steps to enable employees, partners, contractors and even customers with the apps, devices and services they need to be productive, while also securing increasingly mobile workforces. Our data supports what Okta investor Marc Andreessen has preached for years—every company is a software company. In the past year, we’ve witnessed the hyper-growth in usage of cloud and mobile applications around the world, the increasing demand to protect critical business information and the rapid adoption of best-in-class security standards by developers and companies alike. This report uses Okta’s dataset of 2,500 customers, 4,000 apps, thousands of integrations and millions of daily logins to answer questions around how organizations and the people that work for and with them get work done today. We review which applications, devices and services businesses and their people (employees, contractors, partners and customers) consume, and how geography, business size and industry impact access to, security and popularity of the tools people use every day.

Key Findings

Size doesn’t (really) matter in the cloud:

Company size is no longer a strong predictor of how many cloud or mobile apps a company uses, or how they secure them—most businesses use between 11 and 16 off-the-shelf cloud apps, and we’ve seen a 40 percent increase year over year in Okta’s dataset of companies protecting their sensitive data with multi-factor authentication for at least one app. The new computing environment allows businesses of every shape and size to provide tools that employees, partners and contractors need. The smallest companies now have access to the same tools, services and apps that large enterprises do, and they can use more of them too if they want!