Enterprises that use cloud apps are recruiting fast
- Summary:
- Customers of identity and access management vendor Okta that use multiple cloud apps are hiring fast and collaborating like crazy, a new analysis suggests
The fastest growing application category this year among enterprises that use multiple cloud apps has been recruitment, suggesting early adopters of cloud-based applications are themselves experiencing rapid growth.
The finding comes from a new analysis published today of cloud app usage among customers of single sign-on vendor Okta. That customer base of around 3000+ companies of all sizes is skewed towards early adopters of cloud applications — most have adopted Okta to help manage growing portfolios of cloud-based resources and typically use a dozen or more off-the-shelf cloud apps.
Slack grows fastest
The fastest-growing application of all is collaboration whizzkid Slack, which posted a blazing 667 percent rise in popularity over the year, albeit from a low starting base. Close behind with 580 percent growth was recruitment app Greenhouse, although Jobvite remained the most popular recruitment app, despite comparatively staid growth of around 65 percent.
The next fastest growers were visitor registration app Envoy, up 233 percent, task automation app Zapier, up 218 percent, Microsoft cloud platform Azure, up 216 percent, and small business people manager BambooHR, up 210 percent. Tied at 205 percent were project manager Wrike and diagram maker Lucidchart.
None of these have yet achieved the widespread popularity of Okta's top three applications: Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce and Box. These are the cloud products whose adoption most often drives Okta into an organization in the first place.
The product then provides a unified policy layer for managing secure Internet access both to cloud applications and, via a VPN, to existing on-premise applications. That's if any of the latter exist, of course — a small but rising proportion of Okta's customers have no on-premise assets at all. That big spike in use of Microsoft Azure, along with continued growth in AWS, reflects increasing numbers migrating their servers to the cloud.
Collaboration rules
After recruitment, the next fastest growing application categories according to Okta were project management and messaging apps, posting 86 percent and 78 percent growth respectively, just ahead of developer tools at 77 percent. Vidcon apps followed next with 69 percent growth. Another way of looking at those categories is to say that collaboration — which cuts across project management, messaging and video conferencing — is a huge focus for organizations that are big users of cloud applications.
Certainly the big rise in Slack — which we just started using at diginomica — reflects a desire to find a better way of working in virtual teams. Alongside of Slack we've also taken up Zapier, which makes it easy to hook in other applications and information streams. Getting apps to sync up is just as important for maintaining productivity when using multiple cloud resources. From my perspective, it's just another aspect of collaboration that drives digital transformation.
The other finding from Okta's research is a significant rise in the use of multi-factor authentication over the past six months. Instead of relying on easy-to-guess secondary questions to bolster password security, there's been a noticeable rise in SMS authentication using mobile devices and a continued rise in the use of security tokens, both hard and soft. When cloud becomes the primary home of enterprise applications, more effective security processes are crucial.
Image credit: Business man hand with mobile phone and app icons © warakorn - Fotolia.com; Chart courtesy of Okta.
Disclosure: Salesforce is a diginomica premier partner.