Ever-increasing demands for remote work and the shift to cloud-as-default have propelled many companies to re-energize their data protection and threat neutralization strategies. Successful strategies emphasize robust identity and access management (IAM) and detailed visibility into all traffic and transactions. Okta, one of our strategic partners for IAM, recently published its eighth annual Business at Work report. Okta identifies Netskope as the fastest-growing application by number of unique workers, with an astounding 913% year-over-year gain. Clearly, security is experiencing a renaissance.
Anonymized data assembled from thousands of companies, applications, and IT integrations, plus millions of daily authentications and verifications around the world, inform Okta’s reporting and analysis. Each year Okta highlights the most popular and the fastest-growing applications, along with extra context, such as region and industry. Okta also identifies distinct trends that characterize common patterns from year to year. I’d like to highlight a couple of these trends to explore the benefits of Netskope’s partnership with Okta.
Tear down this (fire)wall
One major theme for 2022 is, unsurprisingly, work from anywhere. Okta observes that products and services installed as “temporary stopgap measures during a time of crisis” morphed into long-term deployments that “fuel better workplace collaboration, clearer communication, and stronger security for teams around the world or across the room—or, increasingly, both.”
Another theme, one that enables the first, is the cloud is inescapable. No matter how you slice it—whether by category or region or industry or unique workers or customer count—SaaS applications dominate. Okta’s data indicates that companies deploy an average of 89 applications; companies with more than 2000 employees deploy an average of 187. But wait: are these numbers on the low side?
The Netskope July 2021 Cloud and Threat Report indicates an average of 805 applications. Why the discrepancy? Unmanaged SaaS. Whether you view it as pernicious shadow IT or propitious business IT, it constitutes 97% of your overall SaaS utilization, likely bypassing your identity provider (IdP). Alarmingly, 48% of unmanaged SaaS receives a poor Netskope Cloud Confidence Index risk rating. Can you articulate, with certainty, that you know exactly where your sensitive data is? Yeah no, I thought so.
With Netskope and Okta, converting unmanaged SaaS to managed SaaS is simple and quick. We can show you a handy demo in under two minutes. Not only does the application become managed by Netskope, but also a specific activity triggers Okta to intervene with a step-up authentication prompt, even if the application lacks IdP integration. Here’s the setup:
Of course, most typical business functions should transpire in approved applications. But when it