Managing enterprise IT can be like playing whack-a-mole. When PCs first started appearing in organizations, IT had to run hard to keep up with the new applications and to keep track of the fragmenting data landscape. When the web came along and made life even harder for the IT team, some organizations turned to a kind of neo-green screen strategy, with locked-down desktops and constrained browsers – a great advantage of thin-client technologies is IT gets to manage corporate data.
The current round in the battle is the problem of Shadow IT. This is about parts of the business signing up for stuff-as-a-service without IT knowing anything about it. Leave aside the worries about uncontrolled costs, unapproved service agreements, and unverified security regimes. Just think about what Shadow IT is doing to data governance. The IT department has a strong obligation to educate people about the care and management of data. This means monitoring the external services being used across the organization and liaising with their users. You could call it Shadow Shadow IT. GFI
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