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Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the most popular enterprise cloud service, according to the latest quarterly report from Skyhigh Networks, while the number of cloud services used by firms continues to rise.
According to the report the average employee uses 27 apps at work, while the average number of cloud services in use per company was 897 in Q414, which compares favourably against 831 in Q3 and 626 in Q413. The biggest rise in app type was development, which saw a 97% spike in usage year on year. Collaboration went up 53%, file sharing 20%, business intelligence 18% and social media 17%.
As this publication reported back in October, Amazon continues to assert its dominance in enterprise cloud services. For Q414 figures, AWS finished top ahead of Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, Cisco WebEx, and ServiceNow. Yammer, Box and Zendesk also made the top 10 while Workday was in the top 20, leading Skyhigh to comment: “Representing a new generation of enterprise software players, four companies in the list went public in the last 36 months.”
The top file sharing service, as it has been for the past year, was Dropbox, with Google Drive, OneDrive, and Box behind. Office 365 continues to be the most popular collaboration service, ahead of Gmail, Yammer, Yahoo Mail and Cisco WebEx.
Yet the report had an interesting undercurrent, and proposed the concept of the “enterprisation of consumer IT”. Never mind the consumerisation of the enterprise, Skyhigh argues: Facebook, Dropbox, Google Drive and Gmail, frequently used by consumers, now offer enterprise versions which provide greater controls for businesses. The top consumer cloud services, according to the report, are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
There’s a problem however; four of these top five consumer apps also appeared in the list of top apps which don’t encrypt data at rest. 37% of users in Q414 uploaded at least one file containing sensitive or confidential data to a cloud service, while 22% of files uploaded overall contained private data.
The Q3 report briefly touched upon this, arguing how companies are struggling to block consumer products. Yet there’s been a shift in thinking. Whereas shadow IT – employees bypassing IT admin controls to use their own cloud services for greater productivity – was once a disaster, CIOs are now beginning to see the positive side, as sister publication Enterprise AppsTech has explored in depth.
The Skyhigh research also examined the fastest growing cloud services, with Loggly, Todoist and ToutApp in the top three – the latter two appearing on the fastest growing list for two consecutive quarters.
“From the perspective of the end-user, there is an unprecedented amount of choice, and people are inclined to use things that help them while discontinuing their use of things that either don’t help them or are inferior to other solutions,” the report notes.
“It is this idea that led us to think that, by measuring usage patterns across thousands of cloud services, we could help identify the up-and-coming solutions that are on the path to mainstream adoption based on their growth rates.”
You can find the full report here.