Shadow IT undermines IT departments
Wed 2 Apr 2014
IT departments can no longer be the people who always say ‘no’ and must get used to saying ‘yes’ said Jared Wray, the chief technology officer for cloud infrastructure provider, CenturyLink Cloud.
Speaking at Cloud Expo Europe 2014, he warned that staff will ignore IT and go to the cloud without IT approval. He said one firm did an audit of its employees’ credit cards and found it had more than 400 shadow applications being used on staff credit cards with more than $8m of spend.
Wray said: “We found that 71% of employees are using shadow IT and using apps such as Dropbox that are not approved.
“In the US, 50% of users want to bypass IT. They don’t want the security. They don’t want to wait. More than 72% of UK developers are ready to avoid IT to get up and running as fast as possible.
“IT departments say: ‘No, there’s no security, no there’s no policy, no there’s no way of doing provisioning’. Over time, business units and developers were going to IT and saying: ‘We’re already there and you guys need to catch up’.”
