Digital Security is a challenging practice of protecting your organization’s information and to understand the Impact of Shadow IT. In most organizations, it would be hard just to make sure that they are not compromised through your networks, communication systems, and storage systems. Having to worry about information that is outside your control, and that you know little or nothing about, makes it even harder.
One of the crucial problem for an organization in Shadow IT is that the business units invest on purchasing of the subdomains, which hasn’t been utilized or not intimated to IT, this can have an adverse impact in an organization’s function.
In most organizations, when security goes up against convenience and cost, cost prevails and the convenience is compromised so the business units end up buying the application which would be according to their budget and not the quality, however, the impact of shadow IT can cost an organization much more than it saves.
Compromise Security: Keeping information secure within an organization is hard enough in today’s business world. Marketing or any other business unit hosts information on AWS without any hassle whereas IT undergo many security processes after hosting information on AWS. Many organizations miss out this monitoring and review process as it is time-consuming and not scalable.
Increases Organisational Risk: The fact that the information stored in unknown systems, or the one we share it with vendors or third parties is now outside the control of the organization, this can create the overall risk of getting compromised, which will ultimately impact the organization risk. If the organization’s information is compromised there are chances that it might reach the competitors and will have an adverse effect on organization financial status.
Compliance Requirements: Organisations are entitled to undergo various reporting procedures and have to comply with government rules which would be mandatory.e.g.: If Government organization’s information which is saved in any of the unsecured exposed applications is been hacked and the information is compromised, there would be financial, reputational losses to the organizations.
Given the risks introduced by Shadow IT, we believe continuous monitoring of your digital footprint helps you to hugely mitigate the risks associated with Shadow IT.
Sources: smesecurityframework.com.au
