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!
If software is eating the world, businesses are hungry. Nom, nom...
Businesses are making aggressive efforts to enable their partners, customers and contractors through new cloud-based applications, websites, or portals. Even we were surprised—the number of our customer’s external identities in the cloud grew 284 percent from July 2014 to July 2015, while our internal identities grew 192 percent in the same timeframe.
The reliance on security questions—“what’s your mother’s maiden name?”—is declining:
With new authentication options on the market, companies and employees are moving away from requiring confirmation about birthplaces and bloodlines and towards greener, more secure pastures. The classic “security question” is on the decline as a form of verification (dropping 14 percent since April 2014) with businesses now bringing on multi-factor authentication options like SMS (which increased 8 percent in the same time frame) and push notifications for phones and watches. If we were betting folks, and we are, we’d say biometric authentication will be the next big factor of authentication for businesses.
“You’re either in, or you’re out” —enterprise apps can be easily ousted:
Over the past several years, we’ve seen enterprise apps rise in popularity and maintain those positions, but then suddenly fall out of favor with businesses and their people. Certain enterprise apps maintain early leadership positions—Salesforce.com in CRM, AWS in infrastructure and Box in content management—but others have lost ground to competition, including Google Apps now trailing Microsoft Office 365 in almost every category. Media darling Slack has also come on strong, increasing usership 50 percent in May 2015–July 2015. It’s more important than ever to constantly provide value to users, or they’ll leave as soon as something better comes along. There are so many apps that business users are empowered to bring on themselves, the new world requires IT professionals that live and breathe apps.
Asia Pacific might be down under, but not when it comes to enterprise cloud and mobile:
Ask anyone in software and they’ll suggest that Asia Pacific is two to three years behind the rest of the world in terms of adoption, but our data suggests the region is further along in a few ways. We see businesses in Asia Pacific leading in mobile adoption with an average of 23.8 percent of end users regularly logging in from mobile devices, and Asia Pacific is tied with North America in the median number of off-the-shelf cloud apps companies offer employees with 15 (as compared to Latin America’s 13.5 and Europe, Middle East & Africa’s 12 apps). Watch out world, Asia Pacific is on the move.
SAML is finally the security standard it set out to be:
As we’re putting a premium on security, developers are creating apps with the highly secure authentication mechanism SAML (which stands for Security Assertion Markup Language) baked in from the start. Six times more apps are SAML enabled today than two years ago.
Methodology
How did Okta prepare this report?
We analyzed anonymized findings from our dataset of 4,000 applications in addition to thousands of custom integrations, 2,500 enterprise customers and millions of daily authentications and verifications from 185 countries around the world. Our customers and their employees, contractors, partners and customers use Okta to login to devices, apps and services, and leverage security features to protect their sensitive data. Our customers span every industry and vary in size, from small businesses to enterprises with thousands of employees. We provided specific methodologies for complex data points in Appendix.
What should I keep in mind while reading this report?
Because Okta is a cloud-first identity and mobility management company, Okta’s customers are likely to be more cloud- and mobile-friendly than your average bear. Please consider this data to be of a directional nature rather than gospel. Since Okta is a private company, in many cases we’ve provided percentage growth numbers and comparisons rather than exact values.