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. 

Understanding 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.

Related:What Happened to Shadow IT Risks?

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.

Why Is Shadow IT a Problem?

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, from affordable domain and hosting solutions to flexibly priced enterprise applications.

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