Okta Customer Research Finds Office 365 Most Used Cloud Service

As a cloud identity management service, Okta collects tons of data about how its customers use other cloud products. Today it released its first Okta Business @ Work Report. Among the many compelling findings was that Microsoft’s Office 365 was the favorite cloud service overall so far this year.

Okta is not alone in using the data it collects to generate reports. ZenDesk puts out aquarterly report based on customer service data running through its systems. In fact, last year I wrote an article, Actually Every Company Is A Big Data Company with the idea being that data is an artifact of simply doing business. These companies are acknowledging and formalizing that notion by sharing the data with customers.

The company found that it was using this type of data to decide where to concentrate its resources, CEO Todd McKinnon told TechCrunch. “We used data to see what apps people were using and the frequency of usage and then made integrations to those [most popular] things the best,” he said.

With 2500 customers using over 4000 cloud applications, he said the amount of data was such that it made sense to generate a report and share it. He acknowledges that this is a snapshot of his customer base and may not always correlate with the world at large, but it does present an intriguing picture of how Okta customers are using the cloud.

Some Interesting Findings

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.

Cloud app usage data from 2012 to 2015. The top 3 today are Office 365, Salesforce and Box.

You’ve probably been hearing about Slack, the increasingly popular corporate messaging app. Not surprisingly, it leads app growth over the last quarter with a 50 percent increase. More unexpected, PagerDuty, a tool for managing IT incident information was second with 25.5 percent growth. SurveyMonkey, the online survey service was third at 23.5 percent.

Okta app survey data. Top growing companies over last quarter. Slack, PagerDuty and SurveyMonkey comprise the top three.

The average number of stand-alone cloud apps in place at Okta customers is between 11 and 16, and this is true across a range of company sizes, the report found. This was a number that ended up surprising McKinnon who expected it to be much lower, he said.

The report even looked at tablet usage and found the top three tablet users by industry were pharma, biotech and education. Meanwhile, education and retail were the top industries when it came percentage of users logging in using a mobile device.

Since Okta is an identity management company, a report from them wouldn’t be complete without some security details and the company found that multi-factor authentication (MFA) has been on the increase with Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com and Office 365, the top three services when it comes to MFA implementation.

The report was based on anonymized data from 2500 customers, running 4000 applications (with thousands of additional custom integrations) with millions of daily authentications from 185 countries.

The report looked at many other details such as popularity of apps by industry, region and other pieces. McKinnon said that he could see a day when they look for a way to charge for this information, but for now, the report is free.

Comments

Peel Turns Your Apple Watch Into A Universal Remote Control

Does it make sense to use your Apple Watch as a remote control for your media devices? Smart remote maker Peel thinks so, having just launched a universal remote control application for the Apple Watch which lets you operate over 400,000 models of home electronics, including not only televisions, but also DVD players, and even audio and streaming devices, like the Roku. The Apple Watch app is actually an extension of the company’s existing smart remote app for iPhone . And while in a few cases the new Watch app will allow you to control your devices via Wi-Fi, for the most part, it will require the Pronto hardware just like the iPhone version does. The Pronto 360-degree IR blaster is what turns the iPhone, and now the Apple Watch, into a smart universal remote control. A $49.99 piece of hardware about the size of a salt shaker, Pronto sits in your entertainment center to provide the IR capabilities required to operate your TV and other electroni...

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla And Others Team Up To Launch WebAssembly, A New Binary Format For The Web

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and the engineers on the WebKit project today announced that they have teamed up to launch WebAssembly, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web. The web thrives on standards and, for better or worse, JavaScript is its programming language. Over the years, however, we’ve seen more and more efforts that allow developers to work around some of the limitations of JavaScript by building compilers that transpile code in other languages to JavaScript. Some of these projects focus on adding new features to the language (like Microsoft’s TypeScript) or speeding up JavaScript (like Mozilla’s asm.jsproject). Now, many of these projects are starting to come together in the form of WebAssmbly. The new format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++, with other languages to follow), where it is then executed inside the J...

Intel announces the first 14 nanometre processor

At the Computex conference in Taipei, chipmaker Intel has revealed a fanless mobile PC reference design using the first of its next-generation 14nm "Broadwell" processors. The 2 in 1 pictured here is a 12.5" screen that is just 7.2 mm thick with keyboard detached and weighs 670 grams. The Surface Pro 3 – for comparison – is 9.1 mm thick and weighs 800 grams. It includes a media dock that provides additional cooling for a burst of performance. The next-generation chip is purpose-built for 2 in 1s and will hit the market later in 2014 . Called the Intel Core M, it will be the most energy-efficient Intel Core processor in the company's history with power usage cut by up to 45 percent, resulting in 60 percent less heat. The majority of designs based on this new chip are expected to be fanless, with up to 32 hours of battery life, offering both a lightning-fast tablet and razor-thin laptop. Intel is also delivering innovation and performance for the ...

How to Install and Uninstall Graphics Tools in Windows 10?

Windows 10 has included some optional features which are in-built in the operating system but not installed by default. The Graphics Tool is one such package. The Graphic Tools are needed for users who use Visual Studio to develop DirectX apps or games. The tools have many utility like Graphics debugging, tracing Direct3D calls, inspection of parameters, analyzing Direct3D calls, experiments with shaders and many more. Visual Studio has a Graphics Frame Analysis tool that operates on graphics debugging log. It also collects all necessary information to draw Direct3D calls. The Graphics tools also consist of GPU Usage which lets you analyse and track GPU use in real time and at the same time collects and analyzes the timing data of the workloads. Steps to Install and Uninstall Graphics Tools in Windows 10? 1. Open the Start Menu, go to Settings and tap on System . 2. Go to Apps and features . 3. In the right panel, tap Manage ...

Barnes & Noble is killing itself

I’ve been chronicling the slow demise of B&N for years now, watching the company bleed out, drop by drop, until it has become a shell of its former value. B&N was a cultural center in places without cultural centers. It was a stopover on rainy days in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland and it was a place you could go to get your kids’ first books. That’s mostly over now. On Monday the company laid off 1,800 people. This offered a cost savings of $40 million. But that’s particularly interesting. That means each of those people made an average of $22,000 or so per year and minimum wage workers – hourly folks who are usually hit hardest during post-holiday downturns – would be making $15,000. In fact, what B&N did was fire all full time employees at 781 stores. From a former employee: On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the pe...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog