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Summary
The number of cloud apps being used in the enterprise increased by 20% in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic caused a sudden and dramatic shift to remote work for knowledge workers worldwide. Individuals, teams, and organizations all turned to cloud apps to help address some of the new challenges of remote work. The increase in the number of cloud apps was led by an increase in consumer and collaboration apps, the fasting spreading of which included Discord, Zoom, Lumin PDF, and…Xbox LIVE? That’s right, the shift to remote work led to the rapid adoption of new apps to enable remote work and a blurring of lines between work and home that included an increase in personal use of managed devices.
This blog post accompanies the release of our February 2021 Cloud and Threat Report, which analyzes 2020’s most interesting trends in enterprise cloud and web security. In addition to highlighting the increase in cloud app usage, the Cloud Threat Report also highlights four other noteworthy trends from 2020:
- Cloud-delivered malware continues to increase, now representing 61% of all malware.
- Malicious Office documents increased dramatically, now representing 27% of all malware downloads.
- Cloud phishing continues to increase, with 13% of phishing campaigns hosted in the cloud and 33% targeting cloud app credentials.
- Personal app usage in the enterprise continues to increase, with 83% of users accessing personal apps from managed devices.
Update Feb 28, 2021 – Netskope calculates its CCI ratings based on publicly available information and questionnaire responses from app vendors. This article originally mentioned iLovePDF had a “Poor” CCI rating. Thanks to new information that has been made available to Netskope, the iLovePDF CCI rating has increased.
Cloud apps increase
Netskope is deployed inline for millions of managed devices worldwide, with our secure web gateway monitoring cloud and web activity to secure our customers and their data. Netskope Threat Labs leverages anonymized usage data collected from the Netskope Security Cloud platform to gain visibility into cloud app usage on managed devices. Each month, we count the total number of distinct cloud apps in use in each organization and compute the average across all organizations of similar size, using the following bins:
- Small organizations with <500 users
- Medium organizations with 500 – 2000 users
- Large organizations with 2000 – 4000 users
- X-Large organizations with >4000 users
The number of apps increases with organization size, with the smallest organizations averaging 258 apps and the largest organizations averaging 1,265 apps in December 2020.
The number of apps also tends to increase over time, as new apps are regularly introduced into the market and gain popularity among enterprise users. However, in 2020 we observed faster than usual growth, with the number of apps increasing by 20%. The following shows the monthly trend for medium-sized organizations throughout the year, starting at 535 apps and spiking to 733 in October before ending the year at 644.
There were four months when the average number of cloud apps was actually lower than the previous month, and we ended the year nearly 100 apps below the peak. Why the monthly fluctuations? These are driven primarily by one-off app usage by individual users. For example, a user might turn to an online PDF editor in a pinch, but that app isn’t part of their normal workflow or commonly used in the organization. Across an organization, these one-offs add up and lead to short-term fluctuations.
2020 ended with users in medium-sized organizations using 109 more apps on average than when it started. What types of apps drove this overall growth? In total, we saw growth in 25 different cloud app categories. In most categories, the gains were modest, averaging between 1 and 5 new apps. However, there were two categories that stood out, collaboration apps and consumer apps, together accounting for 30% of the overall increase. We attribute both of these increases to the COVID-19 pandemic and sudden shift to remote work. The increase in collaboration apps was driven by a now mostly remote workforce’s need to stay connected. The increase in consumer apps was driven by that same workforce’s blurring of the lines between work and home, with more managed devices being used for personal reasons. In the next section, we look at some of the fastest spreading apps contributing to the increase.
Fastest-spreading apps
We define “fastest-spreading” as those apps that were adopted by the most new organizations over the course of the year. We do this to identify the apps that contributed most to the growth in the number of apps. For example, Discord is one of the fastest spreading collaboration apps because it was used in 21% of all organizations at the beginning of the year and 48% at the end of the year, a 27 point increase in the number of organizations with Discord users.
Contrast this with a different metric, “fastest-growing.” We define the “fastest-growing” apps as those apps for which we saw the biggest increase in the number of users. For example, Microsoft Teams was the fastest-growing collaboration app, used by 12% of users at the beginning of the year and 21% of users at the end of the year, a 9 point increase. It is not, however, one of the fastest spreading apps. It was used by 69% of organizations at the beginning of the year and 70% at the end of the year, an increase of only 1 point.
In other words, don’t expect to see many of the big-name enterprise apps in the fastest-spreading list. The fastest-spreading apps will instead be up-and-comers and other apps that just haven’t historically seen much use on managed devices.
Fastest-spreading collaboration apps
The fastest