Organizations are shifting to modern workplaces at a considerable rate, based on the latest telemetry gathered among thousands of enterprises over the past year. The data, gathered by identity and access management provider Okta Inc., showed a marked increase in the deployment of cloud infrastructure, management and application services. It also showed the increased move to agile development methodologies, tools that support DevOps and, not surprisingly, a spike in the deployment of security tools.
The findings from Okta’s annual Business @ Work report, released this week, are noteworthy because they’re based on anonymized data from 3,950 enterprise customers. The Okta Identity Cloud provides single sign-on to IT resources and SaaS-based apps. Its customers account for millions of authentications each day to thousands of applications and custom connectors among employees, contractors, partners suppliers and customers, according to the report. While the sample spans industries and varies from small organizations to large enterprises, it should be noted that the conclusions are based only on Okta’s customers. Nevertheless, the telemetry validates a number of noted trends.
“This year’s report shows that organizations of all sizes, in every industry, across all regions, are investing in more technology than ever before, with the median number of apps per customer growing 24 percent from 2015 to 2017,” said Okta CEO and co-founder Todd McKinnon, in a blog post introducing the report’s findings. Some notable points over the past year:
Microsoft Office 365, Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce and Google G Suite were the most widely used, based on authentications by individuals within organizations.
Office 365, Salesforce, Amazon Web Service, G Suite and Box are the five most widely deployed among the customer set, though many of Okta’s customers have also implemented Concur, Slack and Jira.
Seven of the 15 fastest-growing apps are security tools from Jamf, KnowBe4, DigiCert, Cisco Umbrella, Mimecast, Sophos and CloudFlare – hardly a surprise, given the spike on high-profile attacks and breaches last year.
The number of Apple Macintosh computers enterprise IT Ops pros are supporting are clearly on the rise, given the 389 percent growth in usage of Jamf, the popular tool used to secure and manage Macs. According to IDC’s latest figures, released earlier this month, shipments of Macs grew 5.9 percent last year, with its market share climbing from 7.1 to 7.6 percent.
Chat-based collaboration and cloud-based conferencing and communications tools also were among the fastest growing apps, including Cisco Spark, Zoom and Facebook at Work.
Services for IT Ops pros are also on the rise including StatusPage and Datadog, companies that provide application performance monitoring and alerting.
Pluralsight’s 92 percent growth in usage last year suggest that online training for IT Ops pros and developers are on the rise. Also seeing strong usage were Lynda.com and Coursera.
JIRA, the tooling platform for agile development teams, is by far the most widely used developer tool, used by 48 percent of Okta’s customers. A substantial portion of the sample base also use GitHub, PagerDuty, New Relic and Atlassian Cloud, all of which offer key DevOps capabilities.
