The cloud security provider CloudLock, now part of Cisco, has been tracking the growth of connected third-party cloud applications across a sample group of 900 organizations representing a range of industries. As Figure 4 shows, there were about 129,000 unique applications observed at the beginning of 2016. By the end of October, that number had grown to 222,000.

The number of applications has increased approximately 11 times since 2014. (See Figure 5.)

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