Shadow IT continues to unfold like a virus in organizations throughout the globe, and COVID-19 has solely made it more difficult to trace and eradicate.
Shadow IT, generally referred to as stealth IT, refers to techniques and units deployed by workers with out the approval or data of the IT division. While shadow IT isn’t a brand new phenomenon, it has undoubtedly grown extra complicated and harder to handle for the reason that pandemic pressured organizations to rapidly undertake new work-from-home insurance policies. The fluctuating work setting has exacerbated the shadow IT drawback, as a result of many workers are utilizing private apps and units to get work completed quicker and extra effectively than they’ll with company-provided IT instruments.
While firms nonetheless face a wide range of safety challenges, Shadow IT remains to be very a lot a risk to information privateness and safety, and with out strict insurance policies in place, it could go unchecked. In truth, the McAfee Labs Threats Report: November 2020, discovered that over the course of the second quarter of 2020, McAfee’s world community of greater than 1 billion sensors noticed a 605% enhance in COVID-19-related assaults, in comparison with Q1. As company IT groups deal with a rising risk panorama, ensuring workers are following firm safety insurance policies–which is very necessary in extremely regulated industries comparable to finance, well being care and life sciences–is important for making certain a holistic strategy to information safety.
In this eWEEK Data Points article, Stéphane Donzé, CEO of AODocs, presents the case for managing Shadow IT in a fashion that doesn’t create extra safety dangers or overwhelm IT workers, whereas concurrently embracing newer cloud-based functions to drive innovation.
Data Point No. 1: Avoid ‘internal workarounds’ by adopting functions individuals are conversant in and like.
It ought to increase crimson flags when workers begin utilizing their private units and favourite apps throughout the workday. However, with so many firms nonetheless using a WFH coverage, the hassle to always monitor app utilization through worker monitoring techniques might be intrusive and might backfire. These workarounds additionally current an important alternative for organizations to capitalize on this pattern to innovate.
Companies that embrace fashionable cloud-native instruments that many workers are already conversant in, comparable to Slack and G Suite, can complement inside IT to empower workers with the staff collaboration instruments they know and love to make use of. Rather than making an attempt to close down these “rogue” apps and units, executives and IT decision-makers could wish to contemplate embracing the worth that cloud-based collaboration instruments can convey to the office. The key’s to ascertain safety insurance policies and strong controls that can defend delicate content material and meet information privateness rules and compliance mandates whereas empowering staff with superior capabilities and companies.
Data Point No. 2: Leverage the innovation of client merchandise.
Many of the cloud functions and instruments we at the moment use for work bought their begin within the client market. Consider the likes of Gmail, Google Maps, smartphones and even file-sharing techniques like Dropbox, which at the moment are…
