The cloud and its SaaS capabilities seem to be the solution to everything. It makes sense. Cloud Software is scalable, agile and saves a lot of money. 2015, marks a beginning for many promising Cloud based ventures and Skyhigh Networks released a sneak peak of the 2015 Q1 fastest growing cloud apps.
Skyhigh Networks, founded in 2011, is a cloud services security risk solution. Skyhigh gives a complete overview of a company’s cloud usage and shows who uses each cloud service and how.
Using big data analysis to detect irregularities, Skyhigh thwarts real time data leaks and compliance violations. This also means Skyhigh is able to easily pinpoint cloud usage trends in the industry.
They have used this information to compile a list of the 10 fastest growing cloud services. The data in this list was accumulated by Skyhigh Networks
1. Slack – collaboration platform that offers a real-time messaging, archiving and search tool that facilitates better communication within a team.
2. Credit Karma – credit application that gives you access to a genuinely free credit report and provides personalized debt management recommendations.
3. Newton Software – applicant tracking software for organizing and improving internal recruitment programs of small and medium-sized businesses.
4. HireVue – digital job interview platform allowing individuals to browse, watch, and share interviews.
5. Replicon – time and expense management software that tracks project time and expenses and employee work schedules and attendance.
6. Fitbit – healthcare application that enables its users to track their daily activities, workouts, and health conditions.
7. PagerDuty – operations performance platform delivering visibility and actionable intelligence across the entire incident lifecycle.
8. ZipRecruiter – online job board that streamlines the hiring process through an interface of screening and tracking applicants.
9. WalkMe – engagement application designed to help professionals guide and engage prospects and customers, and complete online tasks.
10. Trello – free, flexible, tool that lets you see everything about your project in a single glance and make sure you always know what needs to get done.
Where are the 2014 top 10?
Taking that information it is worth noting what has happened to the 2014 top 20. It must be mentioned that every single company in the 2014 top 10 ranking is out of the user growth race. Last year’s ranking was led by ProofHQ with 136% user growth. The company’s service was streamlining the proofing process, from managing document reviews, to getting approvals from everyone involved. The second place was taken by veteran company Qlik, which experienced a 107% growth with their leading BI product.
The invaluable information SkyHigh presents demonstrates a clear growth pattern with cloud based services. Delving beneath that surface remark we can see that these companies experience short-term spikes in user growth, during the adaptation stages by the fortune 500 companies and other MNCs.
A Final Thought – Outlook to the Future
Cloud based apps are still breaking ground in both technological and functional terms. Someday soon, the SaaS model of distribution will become the standard, and software companies who lag behind and fail to implement the cloud as their standard operation will find themselves out of the market.
Cameron Coles, Skyhigh Networks’ Product Marketing Manager has agreed to answer a few questions and give us a peek to the company’s methods and way of work:
1. Do you have insights about the differences between b2b apps and b2c apps?
The average company uses 923 cloud services, which comes as a surprise to many people in IT. The reason for that is that employees are bringing cloud services to work with them that help them do their jobs. This behavior produces what’s called “shadow IT”, that is to say technology not provided or known about by the company. Today, 33.2% of corporate data in the cloud is uploaded to consumer cloud services rather than enterprise cloud services.
2. How do you gain visibility into the size and risk of cloud usage?
Skyhigh maintains a registry of over 10,000 cloud services. It’s not enough to know what cloud services you’re using, companies want to know the risk of those services. For each cloud service, we provide an objective 1-10 rating of enterprise readiness derived from 50+ attributes developed in conjunction with the Cloud Security Alliance. Those attributes include things like whether or not the cloud service stores data encrypted, supports multi-factor authentication, and is ISO 27001 certified.
3. How has the nature of inside threats evolved as apps went to the cloud?
One of the more common insider threats we see is a salesperson taking sales opportunities with them when they quit to join a competitor. With data in the cloud, companies don’t always have the same auditing and security controls they’ve come to expect with on-premise software to identify these threats. So they massively underestimate how common they are. Just 17% of companies said they knew about an insider threat last year, but 85% had behavior indicative of such a threat.