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More than 15% of European organisations now use more than 1000 cloud apps with Google Drive, Facebook and Twitter the most popular, according to a report from Netskope.

The findings, which appear in the April 2015 Netskope Cloud Report, saw iCloud and Salesforce make the top five. Five cloud storage apps (Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive for Business, OneDrive and Dropbox) made the top 12, alongside four social apps (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn).

Of the organisations analysed in the Netskope Cloud, over a quarter use more than 1000 apps, with the average number of cloud apps – both sanctioned and unsanctioned – standing at 730, representing a 16% increase from the previous quarter. European organisations have on average 511 cloud apps.

Yet not all of these apps are enterprise-grade secure – far from it. According to Netskope’s figures, nine out of every 10 apps in use today score “medium” or below for enterprise-level security. Furthermore, 13.6% of app users have had their login details compromised, and more than one in five (21.6%) logins to Salesforce has been through users who have had their accounts compromised.

Regular readers of this publication and sister title Enterprise AppsTech will be aware of issues surrounding data breaches and compromised accounts. Often, it’s the employees themselves who pose a risk; a recent report from Aruba Networks argued the ‘generation mobile’ workforce was simply indifferent to security policy, while other research has shown employees are more than happy to give up their passwords if the price is right.

Netskope makes the point that many employees re-use passwords, or variations of them, across multiple accounts. “It is important to understand which of those are accessing, and how they’re using, your most business-critical cloud apps,” the report notes.

Yet it again brings up the age-old argument of ‘shadow IT’, or unsanctioned use of cloud apps. Whereas once blacklisting and whitelisting apps was commonplace in an attempt to curb unauthorised activity, many in the industry are now coming around to thinking ‘shadow IT’, if managed correctly, can be a benefit for the business.

“Like it or not, this is the new reality for IT,” said Sanjay Beri, Netskope CEO. “It’s thus critical that organisations maintain a deep level of visibility into their cloud app infrastructure so they can spot a suspicious pattern before it becomes an issue.”

Take a look at the most popular 20 cloud apps according to Netskope. Are these in use at your organisation?