The enterprise trends of 2015

Businesses tend to be quite conservative in their approach to technology, so it's always interesting to look at what's been sparking their interest.

Identity and mobility management specialist Okta has released a new report, based on analysis of its customers, looking at the big winners and losers in the enterprise over the past year.

The fastest growing apps of 2015 are; Slack, Greenhouse, Envoy, Zapier, Windows Azure Public Cloud Services, Bamboo HR, Wrike and Lucidchart, all seeing usage across Okta's customer base grow at over 200 percent. Slack in particular has seen run away adoption levels, growing 667 percent in 2015.

The report also shows strong cloud growth in the recruitment industry, with the number of Okta customers using recruiting apps up by 99 percent, beating the growth in project management and messaging apps. Greenhouse in particular has seen 580 percent usage growth in the 12 months from November 2014.

Multi-factor authentication is gaining ground too, with traditional security questions like mother's maiden name in decline. Instead providers are turning to devices like phones and smartwatches as well as biometric identification. Okta's data suggests an increase in the use of both hard and soft tokens too.

In addition it finds that responsibility for security is moving away from IT, with a 30 percent growth in the number of identity management purchase decisions where chief security officers were involved. Away from software it seems that enterprise tablet use has plateaued, declining slightly over the last year. Okta suggests that 2016 will be a make-or-break year for enterprise tablets. The report says, "In order for them to survive, manufacturers need to seek out and invest in strategic partnerships to add more computing power, better apps and features designed for productivity."

Finally the report suggests we may be entering an age of bring your own business (BYOB), where by using public loud services it's possible to run a small to mid-sized business with no infrastructure, no physical locations, no warehouses, no servers and no software. The company's data shows that shows that the median number of off-the-shelf cloud apps at companies has grown by 33 percent year-on-year, Amazon Web Services has grown at 123percent, and Microsoft Azure Cloud Services at 216 percent.

More information on the report is available on the Okta blog.

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