Have you ever heard of Shadow IT? Even if you are not yet familiar with the subject, your company may be losing money and operational efficiency because of this practice.
Also known as invisible IT, Shadow IT is related to the use of tools, software, and systems for productivity within the company without regulation, usage planning, or even IT knowledge.
If you want to better understand what this means and how your work might be affected, check out this post!
The Practice of Shadow IT
This phenomenon emerged in large and medium-sized companies. In Brazil, a study points out that Invisible IT already accounts for 32% of IT spending, compared to an international average of 25%. The practice arises in two main ways:
- In large companies: it usually happens in departments that acquire technological solutions for their demands without informing IT about it;
- In businesses of other sizes: mainly those that adopt BYOD, it often happens through the interaction (often unintentional) between third-party applications installed on personal devices and the applications used to access the company’s system.
How Can It Affect the Organization?
In Brazil, Shadow IT is already a problem for 88% of CIOs and can account for nearly a third of IT spending. Therefore, combating it is an issue that must be resolved as soon as possible.
The reasons for this urgency lie in the impacts that this type of uncontrolled management can cause in a company. Check out the main ones below.
Unnecessary Expenses
A serious yet silent problem of Shadow IT — especially in larger companies — is the acquisition of technological solutions without proper control.
As we said, it is common for other sectors of the company to contract software without IT approval, which could plan and implement a solution already existing in the organization. This type of spending can easily get out of budget control.
Reduction in Productivity
Untested and unmonitored tools can even hinder productivity by overloading the IT infrastructure with a disproportionate demand for resources or simply through the use of software that has not been optimized for your system.
Maintenance Costs
This incorrect use of resources can lead to real damage to the system, resulting in:
- Higher maintenance costs;
- Wasted time for IT professionals, who could be working on more strategic functions;
- Possibility of more frequent and longer downtimes.
Difficulty in Tracking Metrics
Without control over IT productivity, IT also loses mastery over its performance indicators, which cannot be collected across unmonitored applications, software, and tools.
And without a complete view of the entire operation, these metrics can no longer be trusted in reports that would be used for strategic decisions.
Security
We left the biggest impact of Shadow IT for last. With digital transformation and the complete migration of companies to the cloud, information security relies on access control as one of its main shields.
When these invisible agents manage to interact with the internal device network, it becomes very difficult to monitor access to information. The greater the importance of this information for business decisions, the more serious this flaw becomes.
How to Avoid Shadow IT?
To prevent all these risks from negatively impacting your work and the success of the entire business, it is necessary to constantly combat Shadow IT.
How? Management needs to invest in better access control tools, create more efficient policies for BYOD, and invest in communication and compliance.
When there is an open channel of dialogue between IT and other departments, your sector can function as intended to drive companies forward in the future, focusing on the strategic use of technologies and the application of solutions to efficiently manage all employee productivity.
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