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Organizations are continuing to adopt an increasing variety of apps to secure corporate information, according to mobile security specialist Good Technology’s 12th quarterly Mobility Index Report.
The findings indicate that the acceleration of secure work app deployments enables users to perform work-related and personal activities on the same device, protecting user information, such as email, contacts, voice mails, SMS and location.
Overall, the average organization uses 3.43 apps in addition to email. Among those that have deployed apps beyond email, 67 percent of all organizations have deployed two or more.
In addition, 21 percent have deployed five or more apps, and 5 percent have deployed 10 or more.
In the last quarter, insurance emerged as an aggressive adopter of custom apps, a trend that continued this quarter, with 32 percent of all insurance industry apps being custom designed.
The popularity of custom apps expanded in a number of other industries as well, since 29 percent of financial services apps were custom apps, up from 18 percent last quarter.
The biggest custom app growth took place in energy and utilities, where use of custom apps grew from a negligible number to 49 percent in just one quarter.
This quarter’s findings also indicated that employees are requesting mobile access to corporate information located behind the firewall.
The top five app categories across devices are secure browser, custom apps, secure instant messaging (IM), document editing and document access.
Over the past year, Apple’s iPad dominated tablets, comprising 80 to 90 percent of activations every quarter, but in the latest report, iOS fell from 81 percent of activations to 64 percent, while Android grew from 15 to 25 percent, and Windows surged from 4 to 11 percent.
The report noted that the erosion in iPad dominance points to a change in the tablet market as the long-predicted role of tablets as laptop replacements finally becomes a reality.
On an industrywide scale, for the first time, Android moved ahead of iOS in high tech, with 53 percent of devices, while that platform also saw gains in energy, reaching 48 percent, as well as manufacturing (42 percent).
Apple’s strength continued in heavily regulated industries such as health care, education, insurance and financial services.
The metrics cited in this report were directly generated from Good’s internal data, as aggregated from all devices activated across the company’s worldwide customer base in Q2 2015. Good analyzed activations, by month, among all its global customers that had at least five activated devices over the quarter, and also analyzed app usage for all apps with at least five installations.