Businesses at Work

Popularity by active unique users looks at which apps are being adopted by the most users across organizations. Each year this chart sees seasonal dips around the winter holidays as users log off, but this year we also see the dramatic impacts of quarantine and shelter in place orders. Over the span of nine weeks, starting in mid-March 2020, more than 38 million Americans filed for unemployment across the country. Employees across industries were furloughed or laid off, and app usage data reflects that. Looking at our top app, for example, we see that 57% of Okta customers with Microsoft 365 had a decrease in unique users in April. 

Many top apps, such as Microsoft 365, Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Zscaler, Cornerstone OnDemand, and Slack, showed a noticeable dip in user activity after March 31, 2020, all reaching a turning point at the end of May. By the end of July, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Cornerstone OnDemand monthly unique user levels had rebounded to equal or higher levels of use, and by the end of August, Workday, ServiceNow, and Zscaler rebounded as well. Slack recovered by the end of September.

Two tools notably thrived during this period. Zoom, which had only joined the top apps by unique users for the first time in 2019, ended this current data period in sixth place. In our Businesses at Work (from Home) report in April, when we highlighted apps that had seen significant growth in numbers of corporate and personal users in March, Zoom was our fastest growing app by number of unique users. While unique users dipped a bit over summer, by the end of September they were reaching new highs, likely related to Zoom’s extensive efforts to support distance learning. 

Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect also thrived. As companies rushed to protect their remote workers with secure remote access, it joined the top ranks by unique users for the first time. It was the second fastest growing tool by number of unique users in our supplemental April report: GlobalProtect usage climbed over 230% in late March when compared to 28 days prior, and has only continued to rise.

The platform effect

Apps secure a solid foothold at the top

Some of the apps Okta connects to serve as platforms in their own right: moving beyond specific functionality, companies can build on top of these platforms, integrating their functionality into other systems, and even baking the platform’s underlying technology into the company’s own app stack. These platforms become a core, integral part of the company’s operating technology and would be expensive and cumbersome to replace. They have long-term staying power because they are so intertwined with how business gets done.

How do platforms rank among our customers’ app usage? Since our first report in 2015, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace have held three of our top four spots. They may have rebranded once or twice, but they are embedded in our desktops and our work lives. Since 2015, AWS has improved its global rank by number of customers from #6 to #2. And Atlassian, ranked #6 globally by number of customers, has built a pervasive platform for developers. Network effects amplify the staying power of these platforms, making it easier to adopt and integrate new pieces of technology to solve evolving problems.

This year has been an anomaly for so many reasons, and that’s reflected in the record-setting turnover in our fastest growing apps and integrations. For the first time, 90% of our fastest growing apps are brand new to the top 10. 

While we always expect frequent turnover — it’s tough to maintain explosive rates of growth over multiple years — we see a shift in the type of apps that customers are adopting. Last year we noted that collaboration apps were being replaced by data- or security-focused tools. This year companies needed to enable remote work, which meant supporting at-home workspaces and virtual collaboration, as well as helping employees thrive as they work apart from one another. 

While collaboration tools have rejoined the fastest growing ranks, companies continue to invest in security tools as well: for the first time, security tools claim four out of the top ten spots.

The average number of apps deployed per customer has risen steadily across all industries and company sizes, for a combined growth of 22% over the past four years. This year, the average number of apps per customer remains at 88.

We broke that out by customer size and found that our largest customers are adopting more apps than our smaller customers. Our larger customers, with 2,000 or more employees, deploy an average of 175 apps per customer, while our smaller customers, with 1,999 or fewer employees, deploy an average of 73 apps per customer.

New customers tend to initially deploy fewer apps through the OIN, then add more over time. Customers who have been with Okta for less than a year adopt an average of 23 apps. That number increases to 55 apps between one to two years, and 101 apps between two to four years. This year we see that customers who have been with Okta for four years or more deploy an average of 207 apps, an increase of 9% over the previous year. At the high end of the app deployment scale, 10% of our customers deploy 199 apps or more.

When we break out app deployment by industry, it makes sense to see technology companies at the high end of the spectrum. These organizations live, breathe, and even build the tools they are using. In the past three years, their average number of apps has increased 57% from 99 to 155, with 17% growth in the past year.

Other sectors have seen significant growth in app adoption as well. Over the past four years, the government sector has had the largest increase in average app deployment at 140%, which includes a 43% jump in the past year alone — the largest increase in any sector in the past year. Remote work has driven governments to deploy a wide range of apps and tools that were previously a much lower priority, if not completely unnecessary. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics monthly Current Population Survey consistently found public-sector employees working remotely at a higher-than-average rate: 57% of government employees worked remotely in May, which dropped steadily to 34% in September, compared to the entire economy, where 35% worked remotely in May, dropping to 23% in September.

The education sector ranks high in app deployment, with more tempered growth. While their average app deployment trend line has increased over the past few years, they did see a dip down to an average of 119 apps per customer in 2019. However, in 2020 the education sector’s average number of apps rose 6% year over year, possibly as they ramped up to provide remote learning.

Some of the other industries seeing large increases in average app adoption this year include professional services (36% increase), healthcare and pharmaceuticals (19% increase), and finance and banking (18% increase). Retail average app deployment grew 7% in the past year, but 58% over the past four years.

Best of breed rules, incumbents drool

As employees settle into remote work, it’s critical they have the best tools to keep them connected and working productively. When it comes to interacting with co-workers, customers, partners, vendors, and others on a common platform, we see that for many companies, a “good enough” solution isn’t actually good enough. We’re seeing that “one size fits all” is not fitting, at all.

Over the past few years, we have looked at whether companies that invest in the Microsoft 365 suite — the most popular app in our network — are finding it meets all their needs. We also wonder if deploying Microsoft 365 means customers commit to an exclusively Microsoft environment. The answer to both questions is decisively “no.” While the Microsoft 365 suite offers basic personal productivity, communication, collaboration, and content management tools, Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers continue to invest in many other best-of-breed apps. And when they need CRM software, project management tools, data visualization software, or cloud platforms, they look for bestof- breed options as well. Over the past five years, the number of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers deploying at least one bestof- breed app has increased by seven percentage points.

Like the strictly-controlled French designations of “champagne” or “cognac,” “best of breed” is a distinction we don’t take lightly. Best-of-breed apps dominate their category for the standalone functionality they provide. This year, best-of-breed tools Salesforce, AWS, Box, Slack, and Zoom are joined by project management tool Smartsheet and data visualization tool Tableau, which compete against Microsoft Project and Power BI, respectively.

Microsoft Teams comes standard with the Microsoft 365 Business Basic subscription, but during a global shift to video meetings, video classes, and video cocktail hours, companies increasingly dialed in to Zoom. Over 42% of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers now also deploy Zoom, a jump of more than 10 percentage points over the previous year. (This number has increased nearly 35 percentage points in the past four years.) And when it comes to chatting, Slack is also part of the conversation. The rate of increase has slowed, but this year nearly 32% of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers also deploy Slack. And, while they most certainly have access to OneDrive, a standard feature in even the most basic Microsoft 365 bundle, 26% also deploy Box.

In April, Goldman Sachs predicted that companies would slash spending by 33% in 2020. By fall, JP Morgan found that global corporate profits had “tanked” by 33%. While companies may splurge on a few best-of-breed apps, we might expect they would tighten their belts where they see clear redundancy.

However, 36% of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers now also deploy Google Workspace, the largest jump in the past three years. Top collaboration tools have never been more important for productivity.

The concept of a company choosing to lock in as a “Microsoft shop” continues to fall out of favor, too. 44% of Okta’s Microsoft 365 customers deploy Salesforce, 41% deploy AWS, 15% deploy Smartsheet, and 14% deploy Tableau.

This year, with eight apps featured, we see that 81% of organizations are supplementing their Microsoft 365 suite with one or more best-of-breed tools. Nearly 10% of customers are deploying six or more. These numbers have grown steadily year over year. Even in a difficult year — or perhaps specifically because of it — customers are prioritizing functionality over established software suites.

If we turn our attention to the most popular sources of data being fed into Segment’s CDP, we can get an inside look at where businesses are collecting and gathering data to drive customer engagement.

This year, in addition to Okta ranking JavaScript as the most popular SDK tool, Segment sees JavaScript as the most popular data source. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that JavaScript tags have become the ubiquitous method for data collection. Android comes in at #2, and iOS is close behind at #3. Both of these data sources are used to collect in-app user behavior data. Such high rankings are a reflection of customer behavior as the world becomes increasingly mobile-centric, with 81% of the adult U.S. population owning a smartphone.

Finally, it’s worth highlighting that server-side data sources had a strong showing this year as well. Node.js, Python, and Ruby were among the top ten data sources, revealing that CDPs are used not just to help marketing and product teams collect behavioral data client-side, but also for technical work by development and engineering teams.

Developers expand their toolboxes to build the best user experiences

Developers are expected to move quickly, and efficiently. And they need a deep toolbox to build the hottest apps.

This year we welcome two new developer tools, Sentry and Atlassian Opsgenie, to our top-ranking developer tools. If you’ve been paying attention, it should be no surprise that they joined us here: Sentry is our ninth fastest growing app for 2020, with 86% year-over-year growth, and in 2019 Opsgenie was our second fastest growing app, with 194% year-over-year growth.

Our top three developer tools have held their previous spots. The Atlassian Product Suite, whose rank as a developer tool includes customer deployments of Jira, Bitbucket, and Fisheye, continues to stand firmly in first place. Deployment of these tools in the Atlassian Product Suite has grown over 283% over the past four years. GitHub and PagerDuty have held tight in second and third place, respectively.

However, there is significant movement below the top three. Upstart Datadog, a monitoring, security and analytics platform, pulled sharply ahead of Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool New Relic this year to claim fourth place. We also see APM tool Splunk — last year’s fourth fastest growing app, with 102% year-over-year growth — pull ahead of Atlassian’s incident communication tool Statuspage to take sixth place. And deployment of the open source automation server Jenkins has grown 51% over the past year.

Turning to Segment’s data, we see that company size affects the number of apps receiving customer data across the organization. While the rise in data destinations can be seen across customers large and small, the average number of destinations used by larger customers stands at 14, while SMBs use a more modest nine. Given tech stack growth and adoptions of large companies versus small ones, this is a trend that appears to be growing year over year.

_{Note: Data from November 1, 2019 to October 31, 2020.}

_{[3] Segment, “How COVID-19 is Impacting Tech Stacks [According to Our Data],” June 10, 2020.}

The most popular apps by category

The user experience is critical for workforce apps as well. All the most popular tools across our categories delivered amazing digital experiences during the pandemic, and that's why they're winning.

When we delve into our data, we sort categories in two ways. For some workforce-focused categories, such as collaboration apps, developer tools, HR platforms, and video conferencing apps, we look specifically at tools that have been deployed at a company-wide level for corporate use.

Increasingly, however, our work lives and our personal lives intersect. For certain categories, such as travel, health and wellness, and philanthropic efforts, we expand our lens to include apps that employees adopt personally through Okta, in addition to those assigned by their IT teams.

Taking care of business: apps deployed company-wide

As COVID-19 spread rapidly in the spring of 2020 and an unprecedented half of the world’s population, nearly four billion people, went into lockdown, companies quickly deployed new tools to enable employees to work remotely. Collaboration tools come in every size, color, and flavor, but sometimes having too many options can be overwhelming. What do our customers choose for specific collaboration needs? These tools easily walk away with top honors for their specific functionality. This year gave rise to the latest tech stack everyone needs to support a new way of working.

Remote Work Stack

Highlights of our remote work stack:

• Deployment of project management app Smartsheet has grown 170% over the past three years. It boasts around 1.5 times as many Okta customers as its nearest competitor, Asana.
• Box is the top file sharing app, with 59% more Okta customers than its nearest competitor, Dropbox.
• DocuSign is far and away the most popular option for electronic signatures. Deployment has grown 208% in the past three years, and nearly 49% in the past year alone as digital signatures became critical to completing all kinds of transactions. DocuSign has more than seven times as many Okta customers as second-place Adobe Document Cloud.
• Top surveying tool SurveyMonkey has seen nearly 13% growth since February 2020, as companies rushed to understand what their employees needed to work remotely. SurveyMonkey has more than three times as many Okta customers as secondplace Typeform.
• Slack ranks clearly as the top messaging tool, with nearly 190% growth in the past three years. Slack has more than ten times as many Okta customers as the second most popular messaging app, Workplace by Facebook.
• Lucidchart is by far the most popular app for diagramming and wireframing. It has enjoyed 239% growth over the past three years, and has ranked as one of our top apps by unique users for the past two years. Lucidchart has nearly three times as many Okta customers as competitor InVision, and four times as many as our third fastest growing app, Figma.
• The most popular note taking app, Evernote, has seen a rise and fall in popularity, and now has the same number of Okta customers it did three years ago. We’ll keep our eye on competitor Notion, which is rising rapidly through the ranks.

Within days of pandemic lockdowns around the world, use of video conferencing apps skyrocketed, as detailed in our spring supplemental report, Businesses at Work (from Home). Looking at the number of customers, we see a strong inflection point between February and March for both Zoom and Cisco Webex. Deployment of Zoom grew over 45% between March and October, while Webex grew 15% and RingCentral grew 18% during this same period. But 2020 will be remembered as the “year Zoom became a household name.” For the first time, the app became part of many people’s daily lives. Days of Zoom meetings and Zoom classes were capped by evenings of Zoom cocktail hours and Zoom dinners, until “video conferencing fatigue” became a thing.

It’s interesting to contrast the number of customers versus the number of active unique users of competitive apps. While Zoom had more customers than Webex as of February 2018, Zoom had less active unique users than Webex until March 2020, at which point Zoom’s unique user growth rapidly passed Webex and remained higher.

There's been a rapid rise in the need to accommodate a distributed workforce, and we're seeing businesses tackle it in a few ways — secure remote access solutions, like Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect, VPNs like the many listed here, as well as standalone zero trust network access (ZTNA) solutions like Zscaler. As organizations move past the initial “firefighting” and get into long-term strategy, we’ll be watching to see which wins out next year.

Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect provides enterprise security protection to mobile users. It has seen consistently strong adoption, growing a remarkable 1983% over the past three years. Since the pandemic began and companies needed to support remote workforces, GlobalProtect, which provides encrypted tunnel access to Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls and Prisma Access products, has been one of our fastest growing secure remote access applications with 50% growth since the end of February.

Cisco AnyConnect, which provides secure endpoint access, has grown 1130% in the past three years, and 46% just since the end of February. Netskope, which provides contextual security and mitigates cloud-enabled threats as part of a modern secure access service edge (SASE) architecture, has grown 74% in the past year. AWS Client VPN, which allows companies to easily deploy a scalable client VPN solution, burst onto our radar in May and has quickly passed many tools to take seventh place. And open source option OpenVPN has seen 43% growth in the past year.

Some remote workforces are best served with virtual desktop infrastructure, known as VDI. Desktop environments are hosted on a central server and desktop images are delivered to end clients over a network. We also saw a noticeable jump in VDI tools as workers became remote.

Between February 29 and April 30, 2020, our most popular VDI provider, Citrix, saw 11% growth. Also during this time, Amazon WorkSpaces grew 33%, and VMware Horizon View grew 13%.

People are notoriously the weakest link in the security chain, and hackers are well aware of the fact. Verizon’s 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report finds that “attackers have become increasingly efficient and lean more toward attacks such as phishing and credential theft,” while there has been a corresponding decrease in attacks using Trojan and RAMscraper malware.⁶

Our customers invest in a wide range of people-centric security tools. This category includes security training, email security and password management, ID proofing, privileged access management (PAM), identity governance and administration (IGA), as well as on-site visitor management tools.

While most tools have seen significant growth in the past few years, our top-ranking tools generally focus on security training, email security, and password management. Security awareness training tool KnowBe4 has grown 46% since the start of 2020, and 194% in the past two years. Our tenth fastest growing app this year, 1Password, has had a major growth spurt of 582% in the past two years. Visitor management tool Envoy is an interesting case: with sharp drops in workers’ physical presence in offices, but growing concerns about managing the number of workers in a space at one time, Envoy — our eighth fastest growing app last year — grew 32% in the past year.

_{[6] Verizon, “2020 Data Breach Investigations Report,” May 19, 2020.}

The balancing act of life and work: corporate + personal app adoption

By the end of 2020, we were marveling at the layer of dust on our passports and the length of time between our trips to the gas station. Our “big outings” had become dog walks in new parts of town. Most people weren’t getting on a plane unless they absolutely had to. It’s no surprise that the number of airline passengers tanked year over year. Compared to the same month the prior year, there was a -51% change in March, and a whopping -96% change in April, with only small upticks by summer. Our lives seemed frozen in place, and corporate and personal adoption of travel apps generally froze as well. In fact, the ranked order of our hotel and lodging apps stayed exactly the same as last year.

For most of our top hotel and lodging apps, growth was measured in the fractions of percentages, or negative numbers. Bonvoy (the combined rewards program which includes Marriott and Starwood hotels) measured -1% year over year, Hilton Hotels grew 3%, and Hyatt Hotels gained less than 1%.

There was one standout exception in this field. For travelers who ventured out, the option of a private living room won out over a chic hotel lobby, and a private kitchen was more appealing than the all-you-care-to-eat breakfast buffet. Use of popular travel alternative Airbnb saw nearly 11% growth year over year, including 3% growth since the end of February.

Health and wellness meant one thing to us in January when we made our New Year’s resolutions and looked forward to the new decade with eager anticipation. By the end of March the year wasn’t turning out the way we had expected, and health and wellness took on a whole new meaning altogether. Around the world, many workers who were fortunate enough to still have jobs were trying to figure out how to work from home, while some became impromptu school teachers for their children. During this incredibly stressful time, a dedicated few were inspired to turn to exercise to improve their overall well-being, or just to get outside.

Which were more powerful drivers for personal health and wellness: New Year’s resolutions, or pandemic resolutions? It seems we were more collectively focused on January 1. Our gold medal health and wellness app, Fitbit, saw nearly 5% growth in January 2020, compared to 3% growth in April. (Overall, the app saw over 21% growth in 2020.) Growth of silver medal MyFitnessPal was 3% in January, but nearly flat in April. Bronze medal app Strava grew nearly 4% in January, and another 3% in April.

Remember how many of us showed off our homemade sourdough successes (and fails) last spring on Instagram? Well, after more than two months of shelter in place, our kitchen ambitions caught up with us. The surge in WW (formerly Weightwatchers) tipped the scales at over 7% growth over the months of June and July, a bit shy of their 11% growth in January.

Most popular factors

This past year, like never before, we have lived the concept of collective responsibility for our shared well-being. In our physical world, that has meant mask wearing, hand washing, and deciding whether or not we saw our family and friends over the holidays. In our work lives, as many people moved to remote work for the first time, that has meant adopting security measures to protect employees, and critical company data.

Proofpoint’s State of the Phish report, released in January 2020, makes it clear that IT managers had quite the job ahead of them as employees moved to remote work.While 95% of survey respondents said they use a smartphone, 10% had no lock on their device. 95% of global workers surveyed had home Wi-Fi networks, yet only 49% password-protect their network, and 11% said they find Wi-Fi security measures too time-consuming and/or inconvenient to implement.⁷ (IT managers, please take a moment to breathe…)

Of course, hackers never let a good crisis go to waste. F5’s 2020 Phishing and Fraud Report saw a 220% increase in phishing attacks during the pandemic compared to the yearly average, with large spikes in phishing activities that closely coincided with lockdown rules and used “covid” or “coronavirus” in their subject lines. And where are employees most vulnerable? F5 warns that the login page of our most popular app, Microsoft 365, is one of the most popular targets for generic phishing because “attackers know that stealing Office 365 credentials can grant them access not only to email but also corporate documents, finance, HR, and many other critical business functions.”⁸

Okta customers are stepping up to the challenge. They are deploying multiple factors in addition to, or instead of, passwords, and they are choosing stronger factors.

_{[7] Proofpoint, “2020 State of the Phish Report,” January 23, 2020.}

_{[8] F5, "2020 Phishing and Fraud Report,” November 11, 2020.}

Digging into MFA, we see that, compared to traditional brittle forms of authentication (i.e., simple two-factor methods), higher assurance factors are on the rise. Consumers and services are moving to adaptive forms of authentication, such as Okta Verify. Of customers authenticating to Okta with a factor in addition to, or instead of a password, we see that use of Okta Verify (including Okta Verify with Push notifications) is on the rise, from 78% last year to 82% today.

Once again we see weaker factors such as SMS and security questions on the decline. SMS as a factor has dropped from 53% two years ago to 49% today. Security questions have dropped from 18% two years ago to 15% today.

In March, 2019, W3C made a recommendation for Web Authentication (FIDO 2.0) as a simpler, stronger authentication. In October 2019, the new MacOS Catalina 10.15 included Safari 13 by default; it was the first version of Safari to support WebAuthentication (WebAuthn). From that point on, any new Mac sales or OS upgrades supported WebAuthn. WebAuthn has been maturing quickly as overall security awareness improves. Since the fall of 2019, we have seen a steady increase in WebAuthn, matched by a proportionate decrease in U2F (FIDO 1.0).

When Fortinet conducted a global survey of IT decision makers in June 2020 for their Remote Workforce Cybersecurity Report, they asked respondents where they were planning to make new investments. The largest group (30%) chose MFA.⁹ Companies have their sights set on protecting their workforces.

_{[9] Fortinet, “2020 Remote Workforce Cybersecurity Report: Enterprises Must Adapt to Address Telework Security Challenges,” August 19, 2020.}