Office 365 – the most popular cloud app in 2015

Recently, Okta, a cloud identity management company, released its first Okta Business @ Work Report and it had some interesting findings. One of them was naming Microsoft Office 365 as the most popular cloud service for businesses overall in 2015.

According to this report, 74% of large enterprises with over 4,000 employees use Office 365 exclusively. In addition, 50% of businesses with 250 or less employees subscribe only to Microsoft’s office suite. Furthermore, Office 365 is the most popular in the Western world, including the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

Okta has been tracking app usage since 2012 and for most of that time, Salesforce.com has held a firm lead in usage statistics, but over the last year Office 365 which has been climbing steadily finally surpassed it with Box coming in third, according to the report.

Microsoft’s raise to the top wasn’t instantaneous though, as it took from November 2013 to June 2015 for Office 365 to get past Google Apps, Box and Salesforce as the leading cloud app among 2,500 companies which use Okta’s services.

Other key findings in the Okta report include:

• After Office 365 and Salesforce, the most used cloud apps are Box at number three, Google Apps in fourth place, Concur in fifth and Amazon Web Service in the sixth spot.
• The most popular corporate messaging app is Slack. The app, which has seen a 50% increase in the last quarter, was ahead of PagerDuty and SurveyMonkey.
• Certain enterprise apps maintain early leadership positions – Salesforce.com in CRM, AWS in infrastructure and Box in content management
• Most businesses, large and small, are using between 11 and 16 cloud applications.
• Education and retail have the highest percentage of users accessing applications and data from mobile devices.
• When it comes to tablet usage, the top three tablet users by industry were pharma, biotech and education.
• Energy, Utilities and Waste Treatment surpass other industries in the percentage of end users logging in ONLY with mobile devices.
• Over the past year, there has been a 40 percent increase in customers using multi-factor authentication to secure at least one online app.
• The use of standard security questions for verification has dropped by 14 percent since April 2014 while SMS for multi-factor authentication has grown by 9 percent.
• More developers are creating apps that use the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) for authentication, and there are six times more SAML-enabled apps today than there were in 2013.

What do you think? Does naming Office 365 as the most popular enterprise cloud service surprise you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photo source: https://products.office.com