Microsoft Office 365 usage continues to accelerate significantly across organisations of all sizes while Google’s G Suite languishes in comparison, according to new figures from Bitglass.
The cloud access security broker (CASB), in its 2018 Cloud Adoption Report, analysed software usage of more than 135,000 companies globally and found Office 365 continues to rule the roost.
56.3% of the more than 135,000 companies analysed were users, compared with only a quarter (24.8%) for G Suite. The latter has actually decreased – admittedly from 24.9% – compared with two years ago, while Office 365 uptake in 2016 was at 34.3%.
In terms of Office 365 and G Suite houses by size, the trend for larger firms to go with Microsoft remains apparent. Regular readers of this publication may remember a 2015 survey from BetterCloud which found companies surveyed who ran Office 365 had IT teams on average five times the size of their Google compatriots.
Bitglass comes to a similar conclusion. Just under half (49.6%) of companies assessed with fewer than 500 employees say they are Office 365 customers, compared with 73.4% for 500-1000 and 73.7% for more than 1000. For G Suite – 24.1%, 24.3% and 25.8% respectively – the figures show little deviation.
Looking across all organisations, 13.8% of companies worldwide are using AWS, with technology (21.5%), education (19.7%) and media (15.3%) firms ahead of the global trend. For larger firms the figures are even more stark; 22.1% of companies with more than 1000 employees use AWS in some capacity, compared with 15.8% for organisations at the 500-1000 range, and 10.8% for those smaller.
For other apps analysed, the general trend is of gradually greater adoption the larger the organisation. More than half of organisations with at least 500 employees are Slack users, compared with 37.8% of smaller businesses. Box is used by 28% of the largest organisations polled compared with 12.7% of companies with fewer than 500 employees, while Salesforce (18.3% and 8.8%) has the same trend.
The dominance of Office 365 is evidently something those at Google have been trying to address. Last month, the company announced the launch of Google One, a premium tier cloud storage offering focused on replacing paid consumer Google Drive plans.
The most interesting aspect which leapt out, however, was around the change of price for 2TB of storage – half of what competitors such as Dropbox and Microsoft charge. As Microsoft bundles storage in with Office 365 subscriptions, this is a not insurmountable hurdle which Google continues to be up against.
Rich Campagna, chief marketing officer at Bitglass, said it was ‘no surprise’ that overall cloud adoption continues to skyrocket. “Organisations worldwide have come to trust platforms like Office 365 and AWS as vendors continue to bolster security and feature sets,” he said.
“Competition between major public cloud players such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft will only increase as they fight to grow market share,” Campagna added. “It remains to be seen which emerging apps will join them to become staples in the enterprise.”
You can find out more and download the report here (email required).