Leveraging Shadow IT to Empower Employees
Posted by skyhighnetworks on June 24th, 2014
According to a recent Frost & Sullivan poll, 80% of employees at enterprises with 1000+ employees admit that they actually sidestep the company IT department & policies in order to utilize cloud services of their own preference. Employees even purchase cloud applications via their own personal funds. Instead of enacting restrictions and limitations on employees who do so, CIO’s can now leverage shadow IT to allow employees to use their favorite services, whilst keeping confidential company data secure & private. \
IT analyst Marko Ansanelli finds that, "Simply the fact that employers are open and flexible in allowing employees to use cloud services of their preference is markedly reassuring to employees. Rather than feeling troubled by it, they feel empowered by IT.” Furthermore, Ansanelli finds that, when leveraged in an appropriate fashion, “most IT technologies can rapidly boost performance metrics & even revenues.”
While historically, CIO’s and information technology leaders had believed Shadow IT to be a “weighty problem”, or a “protection threat”, we are now in a radically different time period. John Mahoney, a Vice President at Gartner Inc states, “Shadow IT has emerged as an important issue that every company must confront. There are some business and IT leaders who view the concept negatively. In reality, it's an opportunity … it often demonstrates missing features, tools and capabilities. People are trying to get their work done more effectively and shadow IT often fills the gaps." As a new era of information technology surfaces, shadow IT is a hot topic of discussion. Research group Gartner predicts that 35% of enterprise IT expenditures will occur outside an IT department budget by 2015. Marketing and Finance execs nowadays are utilizing technology that they personally prefer best.
According to a recent Blue Coat survey, 8 out of 10 executives believe that increased information technology self-sufficiency is important to create a growing, sustainable business. Furthermore, the most popular services and applications used without the IT’s knowledge include: social networking applications, communications apps, and unsecure cloud storage software. Hence, shadow IT marks a radical difference in the world of enterprise technology, particularly for information technology executives. "There's always been organizational politics and people attempting to test boundaries and see what they can get away with," Mahoney explains. "But the role of the formal IT organization serving as the policeman and controlling the technology used within the enterprise is over. IT has a very important role to play in the enterprise, but the selection of technology is no longer its exclusive domain."
According to Christopher Sims of the Wall Street Journal, "Once a shadow IT service is sufficiently popular, whoever is in charge usually conducts a formal analysis of the provider's security measures and compliance with appropriate regulations.” Furthermore, Mims states that, “As long as everything checks out, what started as an employee end-run around their own IT staff becomes institutionalized."
In conclusion, CIO’s and information technologies should work to empower their employees instead of limit them. Using Shadow IT technologies allows for happy employees, while keeping sensitive company information safe.
Author :
Skyhigh Networks, the cloud access security company, enables companies to embrace Cloud Analytics Services with appropriate levels of security, compliance, and governance while lowering overall risk and cost. With customers in financial services, healthcare, high technology, media, manufacturing, and legal verticals, the company was a finalist for the RSA Conference 2013 Most Innovative Company award and was recently named a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner, Inc. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Skyhigh Networks is led by an experienced team and is venture-backed by Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital. For more information on Shadow IT to Visibility and Cloud Control, visit us at http://www.skyhighnetworks.com/shadow-it or follow us on Twitter@skyhighnetworks.
