In a further sign that Microsoft Corp. is making hay in cloud computing, its Office 365 continues to extend its lead as the No. 1 productivity suite in the cloud.

That’s one finding in cloud identity management provider Okta Inc.‘s third “Businesses @ Work” report. The news isn’t all good for Microsoft, however.

Okta also says it’s seeing clear evidence that small and midsized businesses, in particular, are moving away from Microsoft’s Active Directory service. And the software giant’s Yammer collaboration platform is getting smoked by Slack.

Okta anonymized data from thousands of customers to determine what cloud applications their employees are using. While many of the findings are predictable, there are a few surprises as well:

• Office 365, Salesforce.com CRM, Box Inc.’s file-sharing platform, Amazon Web Services and Google’s G Suite are the most popular business applications, a lineup that has changed little in the past year. Office 365 continued to pull away from the pack in this audit, though. More than half of Okta customers now use it, either on a standalone basis or in combination with another office suite.
• Zoom Video Communications Inc.’s namesake videoconferencing platform was the fastest-growing software-as-a-service application over the past year, with accesses up 67 percent over the past six months. Cisco’s Umbrella security suite was second, up 47 percent. They were followed closely by Slack Technologies Inc.’s collaboration platform, whose 44 percent growth is impressive coming off its already large installed base.
• Slack’s growing dominance is hitting other collaboration platforms hard, in particular Microsoft’s Yammer and Atlassian Corp. PLC’s HipChat. Yammer went from the 17^th most popular application in early 2014 to 50^th in this survey. HipChat dropped from 28^th to 41^st in the same time period. Meanwhile, Slack zoomed from 67^th to eighth.
• More than half of the apps Okta customers use aren’t provided by information technology departments, indicating that IT organizations are generous in extending their authentication service to support personal needs. In fact,Okta said 89 percent of its customers allow such use. The top five most popular personal applications in the period were LinkedIn, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and PayPal, in that order.
• The fastest-growing personal application was Teladoc, a remote medical care service. Personal cloud apps from Adobe Systems Inc., State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., Microsoft and American Express Co. rounded out the list of the top five fastest-growing.
• G Suite customers are more aggressive in their use of cloud apps in general by a significant margin. For example, 42 percent of them also use Amazon Web Services and 35 percent use Slack, compared with 23 percent and 14 percent, respectively, among Office 365 customers. This is probably a function of G Suite’s “born-in-the-cloud” origins versus Microsoft’s desktop roots.
• The use of Okta’s services by external users, such as suppliers, customers and business partners, grew 540 percent in the latest survey on top of a nearly 300 percent jump a year ago. This indicates that organizations are becoming more comfortable with permitting outsiders to access their services, a step on the journey toward digital business.
• Use of on-premises directories, including Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP, declined slightly. The more pronounced trend was among smaller businesses, 30 percent of which don’t use either of the major directory services. “As these companies grow and mature, they may never deploy a traditional on-premises directory, an indicator that usage in large organizations  may decline,” Okta said.

Photo by Ken Walton via Flickr CC