In cybersecurity, particularly so in SaaS management, Shadow IT is a phenomenon which has gained notoriety.
Everyone in the field uses it, as well as media, but what is it exactly about?
Broadly put, it refers to one bad practice happening in structures on their tool management.
To be more precise, Shadow IT encompasses all login tricks, surreptitious licenses subscriptions, and all the similar individual incentives to save time on a task without IT's approval.
We are well aware (or as aware as your peers from the IT department) that Shadow IT does not stem from malicious intent.
That credential loan to your coworker, the one random SaaS subscription you took out of the blue because "you needed the pro plan to juste close this deal and simply forgot to cancel automatic billing from the company credit card" is your roundabout expression of a will to move forward.
That's cool, honestly but reality will catch you in your tracks. In cybersecurity, the golden rule is that all shortcut ways may come back around with a steep and strain inducing risk incline to climb if you haven fallen through an integrity breach.
These bad practices are also sneaky in the way they carry on, unsuspected before the IT team notices them and puts back everything in order.
This can take up months, or years, before being acknowledged as an existing problem. It also puts the IT team in a delicate yet tough spot: they are the ones best fitted to regulate bad practices as well as the prior people from whom those can be hidden.
Hopefully, an isolated bad practice does not instantly result in a successfully hacked system.
As goes for any fields which can be subject to critical risks, strictly applying the precautionary principle is always the way to go.
This is the core idea of cybersecurity as a mindset: anticipate risks when they do not exist, so that you know how best refrain them from happening.
Cybersecurity also knows that risk zero is a imaginary tale: risk is always there, however little. So as you cannot prevent it, per se, you can certainly think out fallout to limit it as best as possible, given the resources you possess.
The list (non exhaustive) of possible complications, are:
You get the picture: breaches to data integrity are numerous and diverse.
Making sure a system is strong enough to resist unknown threats is complicated enough without adding lack of transparency on top of it.
Tackling the Shadow IT issue is a means to reduce these hard to track processes that may bring potential vulnerabilities.
Using a Shadow IT detection tool is the first step available to the IT team to progress towards a more controlled ecosystem.
This step will help assess how widespread internally Shadow IT is. It will put the appropriate team back in charge of access management, and overall, contribute to a more reasoned use of SaaS.
You will thus be able to benefit from that new tool adoption to setup a dedicated onboarding / offboarding programme for your coworkers.
An ideal occasion to make them more considerate of cyber risks, and give them guidelines to best use tools in their daily tasks.
Improving their productivity will now also serve the purpose of maintaining better data security.
