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Yesterday we released our Cloud Report, in which we share cloud security findings based on millions of users across hundreds of enterprises. While the headline of the report is about cloud malware, there’s another finding that really jumped out at us as we were crunching the data for the report – the sheer growth in enterprise usage of the Office 365 suite! Microsoft 365 Outlook.com and Microsoft Office 365 OneDrive for Business took the second and third spots, respectively, in our top 20 most-used apps list. For the first time since we’ve been publishing this report, those apps have surpassed their Google counterparts, Gmail and Google Drive. They have also eaten the lunch of their freemium counterparts in the Microsoft Live suite. This is huge for enterprises and obviously huge for Microsoft’s cloud profitability.
Let’s look at Microsoft’s dominance in our top 20 list. No fewer than seven apps made the list, including Office 365 Outlook.com at #2, Office 365 OneDrive for Business at #3, Skype at #10, Live OneDrive at #15, Live Outlook at #16, Office 365 Yammer at #17, and Office 365 Lync at #19. In our dataset, we noticed that not only are more enterprises adopting Office 365, but more users within enterprises are adopting the suite, which increases Microsoft’s consumption – or sustained usage – within the enterprise. Over the past year, usage per enterprise of OneDrive for Business and Office 365 Outlook.com have both grown several hundred percent according to our data. We also noticed that, besides taking market share from other vendors, the Office 365 apps (especially OneDrive and Outlook.com) are also taking share from the Microsoft Live suite, the freemium version. This tells us that Microsoft’s up-sell strategy is working and their conversion program is paying off. We think it’s also good news for enterprises, as they’re better able to consolidate usage onto their sanctioned apps.
It does have implications for Office 365 security, however. Microsoft Office 365 apps are highly rated in the Netskope Cloud Confidence Index and have most of the critical features required by enterprises. That said, many organizations need to govern usage within the suite to ensure they are meeting their security and compliance regimens. This is where a cloud access security broker can come in handy. In the shared responsibility model in the cloud, in which the vendors are responsible for making their apps secure, but enterprises are responsible for how their employees use the apps, a CASB can enforce policies like “least privilege” for admins (e.g., th