What They Do In The Shadows

Like vampires can drain the life out of a victim, shadow IT can drain your company’s valuable data!?

What’s shadow IT?

At its simplest, shadow IT describes the procurement and use of? hardware and unmanaged applications ?deployed by individuals or departments to work around the perceived or actual shortcomings. It has grown exponentially in recent years with the adoption of cloud-based applications and services.

Shadow IT can improve employee productivity and drive innovation, but it can also introduce serious security risks to your organization through data leaks, potential compliance violations, and more.

Shadow IT Security Risks and Challenges

The 6 biggest Shadow IT risks that you should be aware of:

Security issues: Shadow IT introduces new security gaps. More than 50% of organizations are not including shadow IT in their IT threat assessments. Some applications might be harmless, others open the door to data leaks. Thus, there should at least be a reporting system for which apps are being used for file sharing and more.

Non-Compliance: To protect customers, clients, and business partners, organizations are subject to stringent compliance regulations that are enforced by their respective governments. In case of non-compliance due to shadow IT, a company can face hefty fines should unapproved software jeopardize the confidentiality of sensitive data.

Configuration management: A good amount of time and money is dedicated to creating the perfect IT environment. When shadow IT is introduced, it’s likely not supported as the right people don’t know of its existence. This could lead to a disruption of the existing system workflow.

Collaboration inefficiencies: When teams rely on different apps to get their job done, collaboration decreases and becomes less efficient. One simple example: If one team uses Google Drive for file sharing and another team uses Dropbox, documents get uploaded, downloaded, and edited separately with multiple versions circulating.

Lack of Visibility: Shadow IT truly lives up to its name, it is invisible to everyone except the user/s. Even though SaaS applications typically don’t take up much space, they can impact the bandwidth or simply break. If a team heavily relies on a broken app that IT doesn’t know about, it’s difficult to provide quick fixes or solutions.

Orphan apps: Essentially, software that fits the shadow IT definition are orphan apps, unapproved, unsupported by IT, abandoned when there people leave or move to another area, adding cost and complexity to the tech environment. Shadow IT can also waste money if different departments are unknowingly purchasing duplicate solutions.

If IT isn’t aware of an application, they can’t support it or ensure that it is secure. In 2018 industry analyst firm Gartner predicted that by 2020, one-third of successful attacks experienced by enterprises would be on their shadow IT resources. And, then the Covid pandemic meant millions working from home and using their own hardware, implementing software to do their work and maybe their kids’s schoolwork. This has led to an explosion of vulnerabilities that we see reported in the news on a daily basis.??

While it’s clear that shadow IT isn’t going away, organizations can minimize risk by educating end users and taking preventative measures to monitor and manage unsanctioned applications.

Shadow IT isn’t all inherently dangerous, but certain features like file sharing/storage and collaboration (e.g., Google Docs) can result in sensitive data leaks. This risk extends beyond just software—an RSA study reported that more than 63% of employees send work documents to their personal email to work from home, exposing data to networks that can’t be monitored by IT.?

Why Employees Use Shadow IT

One of the biggest reasons employees engage in shadow IT is simply to work more efficiently. Employees feel like they need to work around their company's security policies just to get their job done. For example, an employee may discover a better file-sharing application than the one officially permitted. Once they begin using it, use usually spreads to other members of their department.

The rapid growth of cloud-based applications has also increased the adoption of shadow IT. Long gone are the days of packaged software; common applications like Slack and Dropbox are available at the click of a button, not to mention the proliferation of single-point specialized applications for sales, marketing, and customer enablement. And, of course, shadow IT extends beyond work applications to employees’ personal devices such as smartphones or laptops.

Getting approval from IT can require time employees don’t feel they can afford to waste. For many employees, IT approval is a bottleneck to productivity, especially when they can get their own solution up and running in just minutes.

Whether it’s IT or another person/department, having an Orwellian “Big Brother” isn’t always conducive to productivity. Distinguishing between good and bad shadow IT may be the best compromise. Finding a middle ground can allow end users to find the solutions that work best for them while allowing IT to control data and user permissions for the applications. This lessens the IT department's burden; if end users don't need to request new solutions, that frees up IT’s time to focus on more business-critical tasks.

What’s the Solution?

All these issues were taken into consideration as we have been building a comprehensive, seamless business platform that is a complete CRM / RevOps solution.?

Eliminating separate tech stacks for marketing, sales, etc. that then require a CDP to link apps, share data, and attempt to create a seamless customer experience continues to be a Venntive priority.?

A single complete solution for building and scaling a company to manage the entire customer lifecycle from first touch solves a lot of challenges, including the temptation to bring in shadow IT.

That is Venntive’s North star.