Gartner predicted that shadow IT is 30 to 40 percent of IT spending in large enterprises, and Everest Group predicted that it can be 50 percent or more of IT Spending. This indicates that a lot of IT spendings are being bypassed to IT department. How to manage enterprise Shadow IT has become a big concern for a lot of organisations.
Because of rapid growth in SaaS and cloud products/services used by enterprises, shadow IT now can operate securely at scale. So now the concern is how can a CIO address the risks and expenses of shadow IT?
To eliminate/manage the problem of Shadow IT, let’s start with the root cause of the Shadow IT problem. The main reason for Shadow IT is that Enterprise IT is not fast enough to respond to the IT needs of businesses. So, the local departments start building their own functionalities and capabilities by buying IT hardware/software/services causing shadow IT. To overcome this problem, CIOs must make sure that their IT group needs to perform better than shadow IT.
1 – By Establishing a DevOps cross-functional team
Devops team would aligns to the business needs instead of IT functions of an enterprise. A small, cross-functional team with a deep understanding of business and can deliver functionalities required by business at speed by either by using SaaS and/or doing integration and development.
It was interesting that the companies who have DevOps teams into their operations, have seen greater improvements in business impact, speed and worker productivity that completely out-compete shadow IT and shared services.
Silicon Valley and other startup communities are great examples of how to deal with this issue of Shadow IT. They develop functionality at speed through DevOps pods to overcome Shadow IT issues.
2- By Centralising the Procurement Methodology of Organisation
Using centralized procurement , businesses can decrease Shadow IT costs tremendously. A central system will provide IT managers with timely IT infrastructure (Hardwares, Domains, Subdomains, IPs, Applications etc.), and allow the CIO to advance goals of the overall business requirements.
3 ways a centralized procurement methodology helps defeat Shadow IT:
- Departmental IT Infrastructure (Hardware, Domains, Subdomains, IPs, Applications etc.) needs to be aligned with Strategic Infrastructure Planning
- High-Performing Global Enterprise Network Building
- Overall IT Infrastructure (Hardware, Domains, Subdomains, IPs, Applications etc.) expenditure decrease
3- Unshadow the Shadow IT
Whatever you do, there are always good chances of having Shadow IT . So, what if we can unshadow the Shadow IT. This can be done via monitoring your digital attack surface, and find out the Shadow IT infrastructure.
This monitoring their Shadow IT helps enterprises to reduce the risk of security vulnerability to a greater extent.
Reference:
https://www.cio.com/article/3188726/it-industry/how-to-eliminate-enterprise-shadow-it.html
