News

AWS Climbs in Application Usage Ranking

• By David Ramel
• 01/19/2017

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) climbed up a notch in the latest business application and service usage report published by Okta Inc.

The San Francisco-based Okta provides identity and application access services for organizations and periodically mines its internal data to gauge the relative popularity of the pre-integrated applications and services handled by its cloud service. It then publishes that data in its "Business @ Work" reports.

The latest such report, just published today, sees AWS passing G Suite to take over the No. 4 spot in the rankings.

G Suite is Google's cloud-based offering that provides e-mail, storage, document and other services, as a counterpart to comparable office suites like Microsoft Office.

At No. 4 in the rankings, AWS is behind Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce.com and Box. Rounding out the top 10 behind AWS are G Suite, Concur, JIRA, Slack, Zendesk and ADP.

While most of the rankings remained fairly stable, Okta singled out two companies for making upward moves.

"Amazon Web Services just surpassed G Suite for the number 4 spot, and Slack jumped from 12th most popular app to 8th in less than a year," the company said.

AWS also figured in other trends identified by the company. "Our data also suggests that automating lifecycle management is critical with apps containing sensitive data, where users can be immediately deprovisioned if need be," Okta said. "This includes Amazon Web Services (with new code), Salesforce (sales figures), Zendesk (customer service issues and requests) and Dropbox (documents stored)."

Note that the Okta research shouldn't be used as a guide to overall application popularity, as it covers a much narrower scope. "As you read this report, keep in mind that this data is only representative of Okta's cloud-forward customers, the applications that we connect to, and the ways in which users access these applications through our service," the company said.