Shadow IT and the CIO Dilemma

Shadow IT is nothing new. It’s a threat long wreaking havoc on CIOs and IT administrators.

But only recently have we begun to realize the magnitude of the issue.

For years, we’ve known that employees and lines of business are bypassing IT departments to
get the cloud services they want to get their jobs done—whether it’s the streaming music service
that curates the ultimate focus playlist, or the cloud storage apps that keep documents in a row.
More recently, the acknowledgement of rogue IT has been quickly followed by a conversation
around the unintended and potentially dangerous consequences: increased security risks,
compliance concerns and hidden costs.

To shed new light on the issue, Cisco mined data from Cloud Consumption Service
engagements with hundreds of large enterprise customers across United States, Europe,
Canada and Australia. The data came from actual customer use discovered over the network,
not surveys. The findings were eye opening, to say the least…