10 Insights from 10 Years of Okta Businesses at Work

Over the past 10 years, the Okta Businesses at Work report has shown the strength of collaboration and security apps, with Slack emerging in 2015 as the fastest growing app. In the intervening decade, we have also been through a pandemic, smartphone saturation, and an increasingly cloud-focused world that touches both work and personal lives. Overall the top line news from Okta’s 10-year retrospective report is good, showing the increasing use of higher assurance authentication factors, more security application utilization, and the continued use of collaboration to increase productivity. 

Here are ten insights from that report that got our attention:

1. The number of apps under IT administration with Okta integration breaks 100 with 9% year-over-year growth after years of stagnation. However, it’s worth recognizing that business units and users continue to freely adopt thousands of apps not managed by IT. In years past this was coined Shadow IT, but the reality is Business IT driving agility and innovation. Both managed and unmanaged apps require strong authentication factors with visibility, control, and analytics for app trends, user behaviors, and anomalies including data movement and activity.
2. The report focuses on enterprise customer use of Okta as an identity service and readers should keep in mind the personal use of the many company apps in a work/life balance. Netskope recommends a cloud risk assessment of apps and cloud services including company and personal application instances with its Cloud Confidence Index of over 82,000 applications.
3. Ten years at the top of the list are Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace for office productivity applications. From a Netskope perspective, remember these app suites have company and personal instances where the personal instances are a prime source for threat delivery and data exfiltration.  
4. Bypassing the company and personal instances of these office productivity suites from data and threat protection defenses is a huge risk. More than 50% of threats are SaaS delivered and often target SaaS access credentials as phishing attacks continue to increase aided by AI. When it comes to data exfiltration and theft, more than 70% of this data goes into personal instances of cloud storage and email for departing employees and contractors.
5. Best of breed apps continue to grow for both specific functionality and the use of multiple app suites. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are both deployed by 48% of Okta’s customers while the hybrid blend of specific apps next to these app suites includes Slack, Zoom, Box, and Salesforce. 
6. Japan, France, and Israel are noted as respective leaders for automated workflows and driving digital transformation. Netskope Cloud Exchange supports this transformation with more than 100 ready to use integrations to automate workflows, export logs, share threat intelligence, and exchange risk scoring. 
7. The report notes an increase in firewalls and VPNs for Okta identity services integration. However, the march towards context rich inspection of apps and cloud services for adaptive access and using AI/ML-based defenses for threat and data security requires security service edge (SSE). At the same time zero trust network access (ZTNA) continues to replace VPNs with an inside-out security posture. 
8. A future area to monitor in this report will be generative AI apps where both company and public versions require access control, data protection, and monitoring for anomalies or abnormal use. Netskope has seen swift adoption of new genAI apps like DeepSeek and how customers block access to widespread use of generative AI, while allowing specific ones including company private instances with adaptive access and data security. Just like how Slack scaled over the last 10 years to its seventh position this year, we should expect the same for popular generative AI apps in years to come.
9. Weaker authentication options, like security questions, have dropped over the years to be replaced by stronger methods and this is a good thing! Even better is the consolidation of network security defenses into cloud edge platforms with integration of Okta identity services to enable zero trust principles. For example, customers get one platform, one network, one policy engine, and one client for a seamless and high-performance user experience with the Netskope One platform. 
10. Netskope continues to show its popularity in the Okta report being noted as the leading app in the Technology sector by number of users with 183% year-over-year growth.

Going forward the modernization of network security will enable consolidation, improved availability, increased operational effectiveness, and lower costs. The integration of strong authentication factors is at the heart of this transformation, we are looking forward to the next 10 years.

To learn more, you can read the the full Okta Businesses at Work report here.