Shadow IT

Last week I was in London and Amsterdam, where I had a fantastic time meeting with customers and cloud partners. During the conversations I had with customers and partners, shadow IT was continuously recognized as a challenge. However, most were not sure of how, or if, they should take actual action…

Recently, I had a conversation with a CIO and her team. We were reviewing the extraordinary growth of unknown and known cloud services within organizations like hers. She turned to her team and asked “well what should we do?” Some of her leaders said: “we can’t control it, so why should we discover…

We’ve known for years that employees and lines of business are bypassing IT departments to get the cloud services they want. The good news is we can finally quantify how much shadow IT exists in an organization and identify any risks. Large customers actually use 730 individual cloud services on ave…

Cloud sprawl is a BIG challenge. Large companies use 730 individual cloud services – a number which has grown a staggering 21% in just six months. If you don’t know by now what your organization is using, you need to! At Cisco Live US 2015, Haley Gallant of the Cisco Cloud Consumption practice did a…

I was once on a driving holiday in southern Ireland. As anybody who has been to that beautiful part of the world will know, the scenery is magnificent, but the road signs can be very confusing. Totally lost I pulled over to ask directions to Ballylickey and a local farmer uttered the immortal phrase…

Cloud sprawl is a huge, growing challenge. On average, large companies use 645 individual cloud services, which has grown 17% in just six months. What’s crazy is when you ask IT teams to estimate, they think they’re only using about 40 cloud services (yikes!). I’m at Cisco Live US this week in San D…

An interesting read for me one day last week was the Wall Street Journal reporting on the exploding yet ungoverned use of cloud services by employees in just about every organization.  Referring to Rachael King writing for CIO Journal, author Steve Rosenbush outlines the potential for security probl…

Technology is a funny thing: it enthralls some, mystifies others. As evidenced by CES and NRF, there is no shortage of gadgets and dashboards these days to help businesses solve their every need. And it just keeps coming. From an IT perspective, choosing the right tools to solve each technology chal…

Moving to cloud offers many benefits to organizations.  However, these benefits come with a corresponding range of new challenges for IT to address.  One of these challenges is what is known as “Shadow IT.”  Shadow IT refers to activities of members within an organization to secure their own IT reso…