Two Trends are Linked: Growth in Office 365 and Decline in Overall Apps

Last month we released our Cloud Report for Summer 2015 – global as well as and Europe, Middle East and Africa versions.

While the main focus of the report was DLP violations, there were two findings that I think are connected, and I wanted to draw your attention to them.

The first is that the number of apps per enterprise dipped slightly. The number went from 730 in the last report to 715 this time around. The two categories that lost the most ground are Marketing (went from 64 to 59 apps per enterprise) and Productivity (went from 37 to 33 apps per enterprise).

Meanwhile, we saw the Microsoft 365 suite gain share, with email and storage making the top 20 used apps for the first time. There was huge growth in the “for business” version of Outlook and OneDrive, with 37 and 124 percent increase in usage from the prior quarter, respectively. These were the strongest growers in their categories, each moving into the top 20 and even beating out the growth numbers in the Live versions of those apps as Microsoft monetizes these popular consumer/prosumer apps.

I believe these two findings are linked. Both have to do with organizations successfully consolidating on their corporate-sanctioned versions of cloud apps. Our customers are doing this through policy enforcement (blocking a user from accessing, or uploading content to, an app), education (talking to users about which apps are sanctioned), and especially through user coaching (sending an automated message when a user performs an unsanctioned activity). As organizations coach users, those users migrate to the corporate-sanctioned alternative, which is often in the Office 365 suite, hence the decrease in overall apps and strong growth in suite usage.

What can you do to consolidate on your corporate sanctioned apps? Download the report here for our top three quick wins for enterprise IT.