What Is Shadow IT?
What is Shadow IT?
Shadow IT (information technology) is any unapproved hardware, software, or systems that exist in your organizational environment without the knowledge of IT teams. Examples of shadow IT include running queries with company data on personal user devices, unauthorized software installed on company computers, and non-approved browser add-ons. Users typically use shadow IT to meet a business need quickly, but these non-approved IT systems result in significant business risk. Organizations should provide fast-tracked IT approvals to decrease shadow IT, increase security training about shadow IT risks, and monitor systems for signs of shadow IT to remediate quickly.
What are the benefits and risks of shadow IT?
Shadow IT is a complex issue for organizations to address. Users adopt it not because they want to bypass security deliberately, but to get work done faster when approved systems feel inefficient or restrictive.
How you choose to address shadow IT within your organization can have a significant impact on business performance and employee morale. Your goal is to recognize the root causes of employee adoption of shadow IT systems and to create a responsive, secure environment where employees don’t need to go outside official channels to be effective.
Understanding both the benefits and risks of permitting shadow IT helps you make informed decisions about what should be acceptable within your organization.
Benefits of shadow IT
Shadow IT exists because it has benefits for employees:
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Increased productivity: Sometimes these tools help employees work more effectively than approved ones.
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Departmental agility: Shadow IT can help solve problems unique to your organization that enterprise IT solutions can't address.
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Reduced IT bottlenecks: Shadow IT solutions help projects stay on track that might otherwise get held up by what employees perceive to be lengthy procurement cycles or rigid software use policies.
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Faster innovation: Testing emerging tools can help identify new opportunities for innovation and sometimes uncover solutions that IT hadn’t considered.
In cases such as sandboxed environments or explorative projects, shadow IT can even be encouraged by organizations as a way to allow for rapid innovation. In these environments, security is bounded, and so the risks of shadow IT are decreased.
Risks of shadow IT
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Data security vulnerabilities: Consumer-focused tools can lack security features necessary in a business environment, with security gaps that can increase the risk of data breaches
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Compliance violations: Using unapproved or insecure services can cause regulatory violations for data security or privacy in such standards as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
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Redundant costs: Different teams' licensing overlapping versions of approved and unapproved services can be wasteful spending
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Lack of support and maintenance: Shadow IT services can lack the appropriate level of technical support needed to support essential business processes
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Integration challenges: Shadow systems often can't integrate with official systems, which can create data silos and make it harder for teams to share information securely
What are common examples of shadow IT?
Shadow IT can take many forms. Employees might not even be aware that they are using a tool that IT departments need to approve first. They pick tools they are familiar with, or tools that promise to make their workday easier. These are some of the most common examples of shadow IT.
Personal cloud services
Employees often use personal cloud storage for file sharing with colleagues or between work and personal systems. Although convenient, the consumer versions of these cloud storage services typically lack the access controls and auditing capabilities necessary for compliance or to meet corporate security best practices for file sharing.
Unauthorized SaaS tools
Employees often sign up for free SaaS (software as a service) tools that they feel better meet the specialized needs of their team. Project management apps, graphic design tools, or analytics solutions are some of the most commonly seen shadow IT applications. For example, a marketing team might use a new survey tool or a finance group might adopt a shadow cloud service to streamline workflows, but each team ends up inadvertently creating data silos and new potential exposure points.
Personal devices (BYOD)
Your organization might allow personal smartphones, laptops, or tablets under a corporate Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) program. These should be approved devices enrolled with a mobile device management (MDM) system. However, when devices circumvent MDM, this leads to shadow IT. These personal devices used to access corporate data can inadvertently create unsecured endpoints that can expose your corporate network and potentially lead to data loss.
Unapproved communication apps
Employees may try to use personal accounts on instant messaging apps, communication tools, or email accounts for quick collaboration, especially in remote or hybrid teams. However, these outside channels bypass your security and retention policies.
Development and automation tools
Developers looking for quick solutions or more efficient workflows might spin up instances on public clouds to test an application. They might also want to use unapproved open-source code repositories or deploy personalized AI coding assistants without oversight. These tools might boost productivity, but they can expose proprietary source code and customer data if they are not properly secured and vetted.
Generative AI tools
Workers are increasingly adopting publicly available AI-powered writing assistants and data analysis tools. However, if these tools are not approved for internal use, this might lead to regulated, proprietary, or sensitive data ending up as part of the datasets in these public models.
What reasons do employees have to use shadow IT?
Employees naturally seek solutions that help them work faster, smarter, and more efficiently. Shadow IT typically emerges because the tools and processes provided by organizational IT are not meeting the pace of modern business or people’s expectations. These are some of the specific reasons that lead employees to adopt shadow IT.
Limited approved software
Some IT security teams need or want to maintain a strictly curated list of approved tools. IT will add new tools only after evaluation processes, and typically only after receiving a request from team leadership. Lengthy approval processes delay teams from getting the newest or most specialized applications they want, which in turn often leads them to look for alternatives outside of approved channels.
Remote work
The rise of distributed and hybrid workforces has made maintaining central control over IT and cloud resources harder. With less physical oversight of employees and their greater reliance on personal devices and home networks, employees have more freedom to adopt tools independently, especially if corporate systems aren’t optimized for remote access.
Cost constraints
Budget limitations can delay the rollout of new software across an organization. In response, individuals or teams might use free or low-cost tools they have sourced themselves to get work done, unaware that they’re introducing risk.
How can organizations manage and identify shadow IT?
Shadow IT should not be managed through restrictions alone. The most effective approach to shadow IT management balances security with agility.
Rather than treating it exclusively as a policy violation, organizations should see shadow IT as feedback. The presence of shadow IT signals where employees feel current processes fall short. Here are some ways to help manage and identify shadow IT:
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Educate employees: Help employees understand why certain tools pose security risks and how approved alternatives keep both them and the organization safe.
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Implement governance policies: Establish clear policies around software procurement and use these policies on your enterprise network and on your cloud assets. Specifically, define what constitutes acceptable use, who can approve new tools, and how quickly requests will be reviewed. Then use tools such as AWS Control Tower to enforce policies across your cloud environments.
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Discover and inventory: Use discovery services to identify all the software on your network and devices. For example, AWS services such as Amazon GuardDuty help uncover anomalous behavior in your cloud environment.
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Provide approved alternatives: Fast-track approval processes so that users aren’t forced to go around official channels to get work done. If multiple teams are using a service, use that as an indication that you need to provide a sanctioned alternative.
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Monitor and audit: Implement monitoring tools that can help identify rogue services and users. For example, AWS CloudTrail logs user activity and API calls made across your AWS environments. It can help you detect behavior that can indicate unauthorized tool use. You can combine this with regular audits to assess your regulatory compliance and adherence to organizational standards.
How can AWS support your shadow IT management requirements?
With AWS cloud based services, you can map your cloud infrastructure, set strict access permissions on resources, and monitor for anomalous user behaviors to investigate whether shadow IT is in use. Here are some services to help limit shadow IT in your organization:
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AWS CloudTrail allows you to track user activity and API usage on AWS and in hybrid and multicloud environments, surfacing audit-worthy events.
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AWS Config is a service that enables you to assess, audit, and evaluate the configurations of your AWS resources, to detect any unauthorized changes.
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AWS Control Tower allows you to set up and govern a secure, multi-account AWS environment, as well as integrate third party software at scale.
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Amazon GuardDuty helps you protect your AWS accounts, workloads, and data with intelligent threat detection and unauthorized behavior monitoring.
Get started with shadow IT management on AWS by creating a free account today.
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