Shadow IT

Shadow IT refers to IT endeavors handled outside of the typical IT infrastructure without the IT department’s knowledge. In most cases, it involves employees DIYing their IT, whether it is troubleshooting issues, setting up their own security, or using their own applications either on or off the cloud.

When people hear the term "shadow IT", they often assume it involves nothing but covert, problematic practices that undermine the integrity of an organization’s IT. In reality, the shadow IT definition is more nuanced. 

Shadow IT also comes with significant benefits, including ways to save time and money while enabling greater flexibility for the organization. To reap the rewards of incorporating shadow information technology systems into your processes, careful controls should be put in place to ensure adequate network security and the overall efficacy of the company’s IT.

When shadow IT is embraced by a company and properly managed, there can be many benefits. Some of the primary advantages include:

1. Faster technology
2. Less time to train employees
3. Lower upfront cost during onboarding
4. Lower IT costs for the employer

Businesses have to keep up with the quickly developing, ever-emerging selection of technologies that benefit the modern enterprise. One advantage of a shadow IT system is the availability of new, faster technologies an organization may have otherwise missed. When a company adopts a shadow IT approach, each team member is empowered to explore innovative ways to do their jobs better and more efficiently.

In addition to discovering faster technologies, the process of introducing new technologies can be much quicker when a company embraces shadow IT. Instead of the main information technology team spending days developing and refining training materials, and then implementing training sessions, each employee teaches themselves how to use new technologies. This speeds up the adoption of new technology significantly. 

If, in the self-education process, several employees come across a similar obstacle, the IT team can help them work through it. This usually requires far less time than an across-the-board training initiative.

With shadow IT in place, you can afford to invest fewer resources in the onboarding process because new hires are able to handle much of their own IT. Onboarding typically involves the IT team training new employees on a series of security protocols. This may even need to be done for multiple devices using several platforms. Training takes valuable time away from the IT team, locking up crucial human resources.

Shadow IT, when properly implemented, can help an employer make significant adjustments to their IT budget. In reality, every interaction between an IT team member and an employee takes time and, therefore, costs money. 

In a typical IT setup, each employee is provided a certain amount of help installing, managing, and troubleshooting their devices and applications. With shadow IT, they can do much of it on their own, which means the IT staff assisting them may not be necessary. This could free up funds dedicated to the salaries of IT staff, allowing them to be invested elsewhere in the business.

Even though shadow IT comes with several benefits, the risks, if not properly managed, can invalidate some of its advantages. Some of the risks include:

1. Data loss and inconsistent data
2. Compliance issues
3. Downtime and fewer required security measures

With shadow IT, you could relinquish some control over how your data is managed. This applies to both the use of cloud-based applications and those in physical locations. As individual users decide how to manage and protect company data, they could make significant mistakes. When all cloud security is managed by an IT team, for example, the inflow and outflow of data can be closely managed.

With shadow IT, individual employees may be responsible for reporting data around important concerns like IT security or productivity. This can lead to inconsistencies, which could make it difficult to track and properly react to data that would otherwise be readily available and consistently reported if an IT team were in control.

The compliance landscape often undergoes unexpected, even drastic, changes. Because shadow IT relinquishes control to individual employees, who are often busy or preoccupied with other important things, compliance issues may go unaddressed. New policies regarding how to conform to companywide standards, as well as guidelines handed down by government officials, can easily slip the notice of someone deeply invested in meeting other objectives.

With shadow IT, if something goes wrong, the amount of downtime can be exacerbated by the inexperience of the user. Sometimes, when an employee has an issue, it may take several hours for them to fix it. But it would take mere minutes for a trained IT professional who has experience handling that type of problem.

Shadow IT often necessitates fewer security measures. This can help simplify the IT infrastructure of the organization and save time. However, fewer security measures also come with drawbacks. Multiple levels of security designed to accommodate a wide range of issues often result in security redundancies. While these may seem unnecessary at first, they frequently provide better overall protection, as each additional layer comes with tools that can catch threats the other layers may have missed. Reducing the redundancy, even accidentally, may result in a weaker security system.

The FortiGuard Application Control Service enables organizations to create policies to allow, deny, or restrict access to specific applications or categories of applications. It works through the FortiGate next-generation firewall (NGFW), which can deliver insight into how employees are using applications over time. The FortiCASB Cloud Access Security Broker subscription service gives an organization visibility and control over all cloud-based systems, ensuring consistent security and data management practices across the infrastructure. It enables organizations to allow only approved applications within the cloud system.

Shadow IT refers to IT endeavors handled outside of the typical IT infrastructure without the IT department’s knowledge.

Some of the risks include:

1. Data loss and inconsistent data
2. Compliance issues
3. Downtime and fewer required security measures

Shadow IT, when properly implemented, can help an employer make significant adjustments to their IT budget.

With shadow IT, you could relinquish some control over how your data is managed. This applies to both the use of cloud-based applications and those in physical locations.