Imagine hiring a contractor to renovate your office, and during the consultation session, you both agree on the materials, the timeline, and the plan. But when the contractor starts working, they use tools and materials you never approved of, ones you know nothing about and have no way to inspect. These materials may work just as fine or may be inferior, but you may never know the extent of damage it can cause until an issue comes up.
This illustration is a reasonable picture of what Shadow IT looks like and the dangers of it.
What Is Shadow IT?
Shadow IT refers to any software, application, device, or technology that employees use for work purposes without the knowledge or approval of the business’s IT team or management. Like the name implies, these tools or softwares are used outside the systems that have been reviewed, secured, and approved/authorized..
It is important to say upfront that Shadow IT is rarely done with a malicious intent; in most cases, employees are simply trying to do their jobs more efficiently. They find a tool that makes a task easier, download it, and start using it, without stopping to think about what that means for the business from a security standpoint. Their intentions are good, however, these actions may have serious consequences for the business.
Shadow IT happens in different forms and examples of these include: An employee who prefers to use their personal Gmail account for work related tasks because they find it easier to transfer work files rather than the company-approved system or a staff who uses their personal WhatsApp to communicate with clients because it is faster, thereby having official conversations on their personal whatsapp account, and in some cases, sensitive documents are even exchanged.
None of these feel like a big deal in the moment, but collectively, they create a bulk of unmanaged technology that neither you nor your IT team has visibility into and no ability to protect.
Why Shadow IT Is a Real Security Problem
Now, you may wonder what the big issue with shadow IT is, at least, the work is getting done. The truth is when your employees consistently use softwares and services that have not been reviewed or approved by your business, it poses certain risks for your business and some of these risks are:
- Your data ends up in places you cannot control: When an employee saves a client file to a personal cloud account or shares information through an unapproved messaging app, that data leaves your controlled environment. You no longer know where it is stored, how it is protected, or who else might have access to it. For businesses that handle sensitive client information, which includes most small businesses, this is a serious liability.
- Unvetted tools create security vulnerabilities: Not every app or platform is built with security as a priority. Free tools in particular aren’t built with security first in mind. Of course, this does not imply that all free tools are dangerous and should be avoided. However, most free tools carry risks that a properly set up IT team would identify and guard against, and if your staff members choose to use these free tools without proper IT management, they could be sharing your business data with unknown third parties that have no business with your business data.
- It makes your systems harder to defend: You may be doing your best to protect your business, consulting with the best IT team and setting up systems; however, if your team members expose your set up to possible malwares through their use of shadow IT, it introduces a blind spot to your system, which will definitely cause issues for the whole business setup.
- Compliance becomes difficult to maintain: Depending on your industry, you may have regulatory obligations around how data is stored, accessed, and shared. Shadow IT makes it extremely difficult to show compliance, and in the event of an audit or a data incident, that difficulty can translate directly into legal and financial consequences.
- The Departing Employee Problem: We touched on this in our earlier post on access control, and it is just as relevant here. When an employee leaves your business, you can revoke their access to approved systems, but if they have been using personal accounts and unapproved tools to do their work, that data and access to certain information goes with them, and you may have no way of knowing what they took, where it lives, or what they have access to.
What You Can Do About Shadow IT
Being aware of these risks can make you apprehensive; however the goal of this article is not for you to create a restrictive, distrustful environment where employees feel policed. The goal is to create a clear, practical framework that keeps your business protected while still allowing your team to work efficiently, and here are some ways to do that:
- Understand what is already in use: Before you can manage Shadow IT, you need to know what you are dealing with. A proper IT assessment of your systems can identify unauthorized tools, apps, and services that are already operating in your environment. Once this is clear, the next steps are clearer.
- Create a clear, simple technology policy: Your employees need to know what is and is not permitted. You need to be clear and properly communicate technologies permitted by your business, and a way to communicate this is through a technology use policy. It does not need to be a lengthy legal document, it just needs to be clear, reasonable, and communicated properly. Identity and highlight the tools that are approved for work use, what personal devices can and cannot be used for, and what the process is for requesting a new tool if someone has a genuine need for one.
- Make the approved tools easy to use: Shadow IT often thrives when the approved tools are clunky, slow, or frustrating to use. If employees are going around the system, it is worth asking whether the system is actually meeting their needs, and if it is not, take the initiative to provide good, accessible, and approved alternatives that reduces the temptation to go looking elsewhere.
- Create a simple approval process for new tools: Employees will always find new tools they want to try, and that is not a bad thing. The solution is not to say no to everything, rather, you can create a straightforward process for submitting new tools for review, so that security can be assessed before the tool is adopted rather than after.
- Train your team: Most employees who use Shadow IT do not understand the risk they are creating, they simply are just seeking more efficient ways to get their tasks done. Regular security awareness training that covers the dangers of unapproved tools goes a long way toward building a culture where people naturally think before they download or use unapproved tools.
- Partner with an IT team: This is perhaps the most important step; having a managed IT partner who maintains oversight of your full technology environment means that Shadow IT is identified and addressed early, before it has the chance to create a serious problem.
Shadow IT Is a People Problem as Much as a Technology Problem
Here is the honest truth about Shadow IT: it exists in almost every business, and it will keep existing as long as employees have access to the internet and a desire to get their work done efficiently. The answer is not to lock everything down so tightly that productivity suffers, the answer is awareness, clear boundaries, good tools, and consistent oversight.
At StonePoint Technology Partners, we help small and mid-sized businesses understand their technology environments, close the gaps that Shadow IT creates, and build practical policies that protect the business without getting in the way of the people running it.
Send us an email at Info@stonepointtech.com or call us at (727) 478-7355. We are here to help you take control of what is happening inside your own technology environment.