Google Inc. may have beaten Microsoft Corp. to the punch in getting office productivity applications in the cloud, but Microsoft has more than made up for lost time.

A look at the use of cloud applications in more than 120,000 organizations around the world by cloud access security broker Bitglass Inc. finds that Office 365 is now deployed in nearly 35 percent of organizations, while G Suite from Google Cloud is used by 25 percent.

Public companies favor Office 365 to G Suite by nearly a two-to-one ratio – 48 percent to G Suite’s 25 percent. Among private companies, the split is 29 percent Office 365 and to 25 percent G Suite. Microsoft has made impressive inroads with its office productivity suite; in 2014 adoption was just 7.7 percent, Bitglass said.

The good news for both companies is that 59 percent of organizations worldwide now use at least one of the two app suites. That’s up from 48 percent in 2015, according to Bitglass. Also of note is the rapid growth of Slack, the collaboration suite from Slack Technologies Inc. Bitglass called it the fastest-growing enterprise cloud service, with at least some use in an estimated one-third of enterprises, although some of that use is unsanctioned.

Bitglass used a combination of mail exchange records and custom scripts on more than 120,000 domains to reach its conclusions. Its research also looked at the adoption of single sign-on, or SSO, a session and user authentication service that permits a user to use one set of login credentials to access multiple applications.

While widely used behind the corporate firewall, SSO is still a relative newcomer in the cloud. Bitglass said SSO adoption is growing, however, with one in 10 organizations now deploying it.  Office 365 users are more likely to use it, with 26 percent adoption among that user base, up from 22 percent a year ago. In comparison, G Suite customers’ use of SSO increased to 6 percent this year from 4 percent in 2015.

The report can be downloaded here.

Photo by Florian Christoph via Flickr CC