10
Feb 16

CIOInsight – How to Embrace Rogue IT

Rogue IT is the foundation upon which innovation can be built. Rather than being restricted by traditional application and product development processes, non-IT teams can rapidly deploy solutions matching business requirements, thus accelerating new cost savings and resource efficiencies.

You might as well embrace rogue IT, or shadow IT, which will continue to grow in importance, and its impact will be felt globally, according to Tim Kelleher, vice president of IT Security Services at Century Link. Rogue IT might just lead to innovation and competitive advantage, he says. Employees increasingly will bypass corporate IT by subscribing to new collaboration, analytics or other cloud services to get work done, he says. Others will build homegrown applications via the cloud and other development platforms. This trend to remove power from corporate hands is enough to strike fear in any CIO because security risks and bandwidth restrictions can accompany each new project. On the other hand, “while the natural tendency is to limit unauthorized usage,” says Kelleher, “rogue IT can prove very useful to organizations today, driving new levels of innovation and productivity.

More of the CIO Insight slide show


25
Jan 16

CloudExpo blog – Cloud and Shadow IT – An Inevitable Pairing?

You can’t seem to have a conversation about cloud technology and its impact on the business without the topic of Shadow IT coming up. The two concepts at times seem so tightly intertwined, one would think there is a certain inevitability, almost a causal linkage between them. Shadow IT tends to be an emotional topic for many, dividing people into one of two camps. One camp tends to see Shadow IT as a great evil putting companies, their data and systems at risk by implementing solutions without oversight or governance. Another camp sees Shadow IT as the great innovators that are helping the company succeed by allowing the business to bypass a slow and stagnant IT organization. Does going to the cloud inherently mean there will be Shadow IT? If it does, is that necessarily a bad or good thing?

More of the CloudExpo blog post by Ed Featherston


05
Jan 16

Continuity Central – Shadow IT is a cultural problem and shutting it down is now impossible warns SecureEnvoy

Shadow IT – where IT is built and used inside businesses without explicit organizational approval – is becoming increasingly widespread. In fact, Gartner claims that Shadow IT regularly surpasses 30 percent of a company’s IT spend and is the top concern for CIOs in 2016 due to its ability to lead to compliance failures and business risks.

The security issue is unfortunately not only a critical one but a cultural one. When an employee casually uses an application such as Dropbox to transfer files there is likely to be little thought about the risk of potentially sensitive data – whether that is customer contact details, financial information or intellectual property – falling into the wrong hands.

More of the Continuity Central post


15
Dec 15

CIOInsight – Why CIOs Are Losing Control of Technology

CIOs give themselves and their employees high marks for delivering upon needed business outcomes, but they also admit that they’re losing control over significant tech purchase decisions to the business side, according to a recent survey from Logicalis US. More than ever, finding reveal, line-of-business (LOB) managers circumvent CIOs and tech employees in acquiring tech apps and solutions, thus cultivating a shadow IT culture. This creates issues with respect to both tech governance and security assurance, and CIOs now feel pressured to transform their roles from that of technologist to what’s emerging as “internal service provider” to counter shadow IT.

More of the CIOInsight slideshow from Dennis McCafferty