Tag Archives: M365

Okta Businesses at Work 2024 – Legal Applications are the Growth Leader

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Okta has application usage data which you simply will not find anywhere else. This year’s report draws data from their anonymized 18,800 global customer base. Okta is a leader in identity and access management products. You may download the full “Okta Businesses at Work 2024” report here.

Growth in app categories: Legal software is the leader in customer growth

Source: Okta (My Annotations) – Growth in App Categories

Okta kicks off this year’s report with a spotlight on Legal applications, which was the leading app category in growth of number of customers.

“There’s no time for deals or
contracts to get hung up in legal. So, as we look
across the most popular app categories, it’s no
surprise that legal tools have locked up a win,
claiming by far the highest growth by number
of customers (35% YoY) and substantial 34%
YoY growth by number of unique users. Apps
including Ironclad, LexisNexis, and LegalZoom
drive this remarkable growth story. (Fun fact:
Ironclad contract management software was
our eighth-fastest-growing app in 2022.)”

-Okta (my bold type)

Let’s look at those three applications:

Ironclad – Offers Contract Management software, which includes moving sales contracts through the processes of review and sign-off to speed the business process.

LexisNexis – Provides legal, regulatory, and business information and analytics, now including Generative AI. LexisNexis is a premier product in legal research.

LegalZoom – Its online platform for business formation helps entrepreneurs by providing legal, tax and compliance products and expertise.

With that promising look at the growth in Legal applications, let’s take a look at four more charts in the Okta report.

Growth of the 50 most popular apps

Source: Okta

There are two leaders here. 1Password is the fastest growing application by number of customers at 39% YoY. Amazon Business with the fastest growing by number of unique users at 89% YoY growth. Law firms are ramping up usage of password managers like 1Password as one of the essential tools to prevent phishing and social engineering exploits.

Not to be missed by law firms is the growth of KnowBe4 at over 20%. KnowBe4 is a Security Awareness Training product, with a focus on phishing awareness. In 2022 I cited that KnowBe4 was the leading Security Awareness solution used by 62% of law firms surveyed in the International Legal Technology Association’s 2022 Technology Survey.

Most popular apps

Source: Okta

It’s easy to see the trend of law firms in the “Overall” ranking. Microsoft 365 is rapidly being adopted, as firms migrate from other Microsoft on-prem products. Number five, Zoom, and number eight, DocuSign, are nearly ubiquitous at law firms. Number ten is KnowBe4, the Security Awareness training SaaS application.

Fastest-growing apps by number of customers

Source: Okta

Data compliance applications make a first time appearance in the fastest growing app ranking by number of customers. Vanta holds the number one position with 338% YoY growth. Drata ranks number six, with 91% YoY growth. Data compliance software is growing at law firms as firms are subject to regulatory and client requirements.

Most popular security tool categories

Source: Okta

Okta entitles this section: “The perimeter shifts.”

They observe that VPN/firewall continues to lead the security tool category, as it has since 2020. However, deployment of VPN/firewall grew 12% last year versus 31% in the prior year. 57% of customers have deployed VPN/firewall tools.

The second fastest growing category in security tools is Endpoint Management and Security, deployed by 43% of customers. This category has grown consistently since the emergence of work-from-home.

For those interested in legal or enterprise technology there is much more in the Okta report worth looking at in detail. You may find the report here.

– Maureen

Okta’s 2021 Businesses at Work Report

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Each year I look forward to Okta’s Businesses at Work report. Okta anonymizes data from its more than 9,400 customer entities. These are customers which use the Okta Identity Network (OIN) with its over 6,500 integrations with cloud, mobile, and web apps, and with IT infrastructure providers. The report is free, not even a registration is needed. To my knowledge no other public report provides this level of data on cloud application usage.

For data lovers it’s a treasure trove of facts about cloud usage. There are over 28 charts and tables. Download it here. I’ll share a few of my favorite insights from the report.

Most Popular Apps by Number of Customers

Microsoft 365 wins. I attended a legal technology conference in 2014. In a session on SharePoint, hosted by Microsoft, the roadmap showed that Outlook, Exchange, and, yes, SharePoint were all moving to the cloud in the form of Office 365. People exited the room in fury. At that time, most law firms were adamant – No Cloud. While there will always be law firms, especially “Big Law,” which will keep Outlook, SharePoint, and the Office Suite on-premises, the adoption of Office 365 or Microsoft 365 in the legal sector has been swift over the past two years. The Okta data reflects this.

This chart shows that the gap in usage between Microsoft 365 and all other applications, including AWS and Salesforce, has only widened in the past 5 years.

Most Popular Video Conferencing Apps

This graph highlights the steep curve in Zoom usage which we all lived through in 2020. At Mobile Helix, we started using Zoom heavily in 2017. We even perform our LINK system deployments remotely over Zoom in about two hours. When the pandemic hit, we were easily able to deploy LINK with IT staff who were themselves working from home. Customers favor our over-Zoom deployment over an on-site visit as it ends up taking less of their time.

Customers Authenticating With Each Factor

Phishing has been up 220% during the pandemic per F5’s 2020 Phishing and Fraud Report (an excellent report on phishing). The Okta report quotes, “F5 warns that the login page of our most popular app, Microsoft 365 (M365), 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.”

Strong Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) should be used with M365. The chart above shows that of Okta customers authenticating with a factor in addition to, or instead of a password, 82% use Okta Verify. The good news here is that weaker factors such as SMS and security questions are on the decline.

One of the positive conclusions from Okta’s 2021 Businesses at Work report has to be that as difficult as 2020 was, with 38M people applying for unemployment, if it had happened even 10 years earlier, how many people would have been unable to work from home? The growth of web-based applications, cloud-based services, and mobile apps resulted in most office jobs successfully transitioning to work-from-home in two or three weeks.

2020 was The Year of the Cloud.

-Maureen