When organizations don’t provide an approved cloud application that enables employees to share and exchange files instantly, users will bring their own cloud.
Before “cloud sprawl” can be fully understood, we need a basic understanding of cloud computing. One useful definition is: “a colloquial expression used to describe a variety of different types of computing concepts that involve a large number of computers connected through a real-time communication network (such as the Internet).”
The phrase also commonly refers to virtual servers that store information for an organization, including saved documents, organizational data and software programs. Understanding this, we can define cloud sprawl.
Cloud sprawl is the distribution of organizational data across multiple cloud-based applications. For example, having different business departments using different clouds—such as Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, iCloud and others—leads to cloud sprawl. This is not a good situation because the CIO and IT asset managers have lost control, corporate data is scattered about on multiple platforms and data security is at risk.
