Enterprises have embraced cloud computing at a phenomenal clip, according to newly-released report, A for Adoption, from cloud access security broker provider Bitglass.
Over the past five years, the report found cloud penetration grew from 24% (in 2014) to 86% of organizations today. Last year, that adoption rate was 81%. Yet, while cloud has helped enterprises to reduce IT capital expenditures and become more agile in meeting business demands, these organizations need to be cognizant of the impact the shift to the cloud has on securing user access—something the report hints as an area where organizations lack.
For instance, the Bitglass report found, of the 86% of organizations that adopted cloud, only 34% of those have implemented single sign-on (SSO). In addition to tracking SSO usage, Bitglass uncovered adoption rates for a host of different cloud-based tools, including Microsoft Office 365, Google’s G Suite, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Slack, Salesforce, Box and ServiceNow.
The annual report highlighted the rapid increase in the adoption of a number of services, such as Salesforce and Slack, which respectively increased by 55% and 44%.
The survey also found that Google’s G Suite, with a 33% adoption rate, is still struggling to regain headway on Microsoft Office 365 and that productivity suite’s 79% adoption rate. At 82%, financial services organizations are the fourth largest adopters of Office 365, while 79% of healthcare organizations have done so.
Those enterprises that have deployed AWS increased by 43% in one year, reaching 20% adoption across all industries this year. Not surprisingly, the technology industry is the leading implementer of AWS at a 32% rate and is also the leading industry using Slack at 79%.
One of the greatest challenges when it comes to effectively managing and securing access to the cloud is access management. Interestingly, only 34% of enterprises have implemented SSO for cloud access. However, the amount of SSO adoption varies significantly from industry to industry.
For instance, the adoption of SSO in financial services grew nearly 41% year over year, while in healthcare that growth reached 30%. However, the technology industry hasn’t embraced SSO much more, having reached a 33% adoption rate. Interestingly, education led SSO adoption at 61%, with the government firmly in second with 46%.
The adoption of SSO also varied by organizational size. As it turned out, larger organizations are the leading adopters of SSO. In fact, 64% of large firms said they utilize SSO, which is nearly 50% more than what medium-sized organizations reported. That’s more than twice the adoption of small organizations.
The Bitglass report is based on the company’s scanned analysis of cloud to identify which cloud services were in use across a sample of more than 138,000 companies. According to the company, the analysis included productivity suites such as Office 365, G Suite and messaging apps such as Slack, as well as file-sharing apps such as Box.
