It’s a BIG shadow: Much like data silos, in the age of the cloud we often suffer from – Shadow IT – within our own organizations. Also known as “Stealth IT,” these are IT solutions or tools that are built and used within an organization that don’t have official approval. Sometimes they don’t seem like that big of a deal, but any IT expert knows how problematic it is to have IT tools that don’t line up with official plans.
And here’s the awful truth. Your shadow IT is likely 10-15x larger than you realize. In fact, it’s estimated that 40% of the average company’s IT spending isn’t spent by the IT department! With the growth of the mobile app market, that number is only going to increase.
We know that chasing Shadow IT costs money, but there’s also a bigger picture that many organizations are still missing. Shadow IT has some common root causes. The right paradigm, coupled with the next generation of enterprise mobility, can make Shadow IT obsolete!
Shadow IT exists with good reason
Here’s the good news: your employees are not doing this to torture you. When your actual IT department “app wraps,” the end result is secure, but it’s also less functional and intuitive than the SaaS employees use when they’re not at work. They feel the gap intensely. To maintain their workflow, employees work around IT restrictions through unapproved devices. It genuinely does increase their efficiency.
Attempts to control Shadow IT may worsen the problem
The problem with mobile apps is that they’re like Pokemon—only you’re never going to catch them all. Policing shadow IT can actually increase your risk, because as you lock out the apps you catch people using most, they move to less-secure fringe apps that do what the old ones did.
There really are solutions
If you’ve had an antagonistic relationship with Shadow IT in the past, hopefully this blog will begin the thaw. The truth is, Shadow IT is usually a sign of innovative thinking amongst your employees. The question is how to encourage their initiative while maintaining your security needs.
For starters, let’s redefine what security looks like. As your software and platforms migrate to the cloud, gatekeeping devices makes less and less sense. Users with the proper permissions can log onto cloud servers from any device, anywhere. So the key to protecting your data is to protect it where it actually lives. Take a look at a Virtual Mobile Infrastructure (VMI). It creates an actual virtual operating system in the cloud within a data center. What’s more, you can host apps in your virtual operating system, and the corporate data being employed by those apps will be secured in your virtual data center. It will never be on users’ individual devices at all.
Leading your Shadow IT out of the shadows is a crucial part of this transition. Open a dialogue, and you can actually create a corporate culture where your most innovative talent tests SaaS for you. You can then adopt the most useful mobile apps into your secure, cloud-based data center so everyone can use them.
Finding out why your employees have chosen the solutions they have can drive innovation in your company. Don’t squash your Shadow IT. Leverage it.
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