IT leaders taking wrong approach to accommodate shadow IT, says Talon Storage

Recent research shows that Shadow IT continues to grow in enterprise IT, particularly in the area of collaboration software. However, while the answer for many IT leaders has been to procure their own versions of collaboration tools, the result, either way, is the duplication of documents on external cloud platforms that create greater security risks to organisations. IT leaders need to take more leadership when it comes to meeting business need in a secure and efficient way, according to Andrew Mullen, VP of Sales and Marketing at Talon.

The development of shadow IT has been dominated by the proliferation of external SaaS collaboration platforms as employees look to improve productivity, but the problem is that the documents and data in question are still being taken externally to the organisation’s infrastructure – creating unknown quantities of risk that is hard to assess or manage.

Andrew Mullen comments: “Shadow IT is a major risk for any organisation, and it’s no easy task for IT leaders to eradicate illegitimate software as almost anyone can purchase low-cost subscription licenses and have new applications up and running in no time at all. IT leaders either approve the use of this software, without doing a full risk assessment, or procure their own version of it.

“IT leaders can solve the threat posed by shadow IT by reassessing their current IT estate’s collaboration capabilities and to find ways to make sure that data never needs to leave the enterprise IT estate. Enabling collaboration on documents in such a way removes the need for employees to go to external platforms, such as the public cloud.”

Mullen concluded: “Intelligent file access and collaboration software within the IT estate that delivers optimal global file sharing, which overcomes the barriers of latency, bandwidth and network reliability, will not only significantly reduce the risk of shadow IT, but will lead to more effective document management and avoid file duplication, improving employee productivity. Failure to do so will only result in the continuation of data leakage – a growing problem for large-scale organisations operating in multiple geographic areas.”