Secure browser and IM apps continued to lead the way in the first three months of the year as organizations increasingly looked to tap the power of mobile working, according to Good Technology.
The firm appraised the activity of its enterprise customers to compile the Q1 2015 Mobility Index Report, revealing that from April 2014 to March 2015 there was an impressive 160% growth in app activations.
For the second quarter in a row, secure browsers were the most popular category, representing 21% of the total, with secure IM apps in second place.
There are definite variations in the kind of apps which are popular across different sectors, however, the report found.
Secure IM was most popular in financial services, for example, accounting for 27% of the total apps activated. Secure browsers, however, came top in manufacturing, where they accounted for nearly half (47%) of those activated in Q1.
“Instant messaging is more of a behavioral thing; people are used to using it, the reason behind the growth. We’re also seeing a growing interest in secure video services provided by CounterPath for the likes of wealth managers and personal banking,” explained Good Technology’s EMEA general manager, Phil Barnett.
“People want more than just an automated messaging system, they want someone to talk to. Secure browsing has broad adoption across multiple verticals and dominated app adoption across industries like manufacturing and transformation.”
Despite falling to third place overall, custom apps remained popular in certain industries like insurance, where one third (34%) of all applications activated in Q1 were built in-house.
“Security is one of the clear motivations for companies building custom applications. Corporate applications give employees all the tools they need to do their jobs, without the headache for the IT department,” Barnett told Infosecurity.
“People now have a more mature approach to enterprise mobility; they’re realizing they can achieve business transformation through custom applications. They’re not just looking to access their email anymore, they’re looking to facilitate entire workflows and do everything they could do at their desktop on their mobile. For this to be possible, they now need to be using a wider range of applications than they were using before.”