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Technology: IT Departments are Often the Worst Shadow IT Offenders
Shadow IT refers to technology built or used within an organization without official approval.
While Shadow IT can often make employees more productive, the flip side is that the use of unapproved IT tools can often lead to security and compliance issues.
A Frost and Sullivan Stratecast report found that Shadow IT isn’t only practiced by employees outside of the IT department. Actually, the report found that 91 percent of IT departments are extensively using at least one unapproved SaaS application, and as many as 25 percent of IT departments have using six or more unauthorized applications. Nineteen percent of IT staff also say that they personally use six or more SaaS applications that aren’t officially approved by their organization.
The report notes that “IT professionals themselves are by far the worst offenders when it comes to using unauthorized services. What’s more surprising is that IT holds itself above its own practices.”
Lynda Stadtmueller, cloud program director at Frost and Sullivan, told Network Computing that “an IT person may feel more confident in their abilities. It’s very much an attitude of ‘It’s okay for me … don’t you do it’. In reality, that’s probably not true, especially when you have multiple IT people, each with their own specialties, each doing their own thing. It can be pretty risky.”
One main reason why Shadow IT occurs is organizational bureaucracy. The Stratecast report identified the following reasons why employees resort to using unapproved technology:
- Approval process for applications takes too long (38 percent of business and 32 percent of IT workers)
- Non-approved applications often do a better job than approved ones (24 percent)
- Approved applications have gaps in functionality that can be filled by non-approved applications (18 percent of business and 14 percent of IT workers)
