How To Minimize the Impacts of Shadow IT on Your Business
Self-starting and initiative are desirable traits in a worker. Every employee should look for and find ways to increase efficiency while making their jobs a little easier. However, as Albert Camus once posited: “…goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightenment.”
There are extreme negatives to granting your non-IT staff untethered autonomy and full access to IT resources. While workers’ intentions may be well-meaning, installing unauthorized software or using unverified devices can lead to unwieldy shadow IT.
Organizations must continue to defend themselves from insider threats. The following guide will explore how you can protect your business by minimizing the impacts of shadow IT.
Shadow IT refers to the often-unauthorized use of additional IT resources such as software, hardware, or (more recently) cloud services and tools. These additional IT resources are typically installed by non-IT or non-security staff, making them so risky.
Shadow IT originally arose from pure necessity and need. Typically, most corporate structures consist of five departments. However, many smaller organizations and start-ups are forced to create autonomous or hybrid departments. For instance, companies that cannot afford a dedicated human-resources department overcome this limitation by delegating workforce management among their other departments and staff.
This paradigm is even more achievable today thanks to the increasing sophistication and accessibility of modern cloud platforms and tools. Organizations now have access to many AI-driven employee provisioning and workforce management software.
Shadow IT is common among companies with hybrid divisions or small IT departments. However, incidents of shadow IT occur frequently in large organizations with unsupervised staff too.
As technological innovation in the workplace becomes essential for “keeping up with the bottom line,” tech-savvy employees begin searching for solutions to overcome specific business problems.
It also allows them to keep up with the evolving environments of the modern office, pushing them to search for modern tech tools. After all, the internet has always been replete with cheap software and network solutions, fromaffordable domain and hosting solutions to flexibly priced enterprise applications.
However, the desire for more robust business intelligence (BI) led to the birth of a multitude of Statistical Analysis System (SAS) software and hardware solutions.
The developers and vendors of some of these tools soon realized that they could generate additional revenue by selling their customers’ data. So while the market is filled with a myriad of software options for businesses, not all of them are safe. Even with data protection regulations such as the GDPR, software vendors can still collect and sell your data as long as they have your consent through their terms and conditions.
