Shadow IT isn’t malicious. It’s usually the opposite. Someone needs a tool to do their job, the official procurement process takes too long, and they sign up for a SaaS application using their corporate email address. Problem solved, from their perspective. From a security perspective, another unmonitored, unmanaged service just started processing your data.
The scale of shadow IT in most organisations is larger than anyone in IT or security realises. Studies consistently estimate that the average company uses three to four times more cloud applications than the IT department is aware of.
Why Shadow IT Creates Risk
Unmanaged applications bypass every security control your organisation has put in place. There’s no single sign-on integration, no data loss prevention, no access reviews, and no security patching. The person who set it up chose the cheapest plan, used a password they use elsewhere, and probably shared the login with three colleagues.
When that application gets breached, or when the employee who created it leaves the company, you’ve got an orphaned account holding corporate data with no way to manage or recover it.
William Fieldhouse, Director of Aardwolf Security Ltd, comments: “During external assessments, we regularly discover services and applications that the IT team didn’t know existed. Marketing teams spinning up WordPress sites, developers running test environments on cloud platforms, and business units subscribing to SaaS tools that handle sensitive data without any security review.”
Discovering What’s Out There
Regular vulnerability scanning services helps identify the external footprint your organisation doesn’t know about. By scanning your IP ranges, monitoring certificate transparency logs, and enumerating DNS records, a thorough assessment reveals services running under your domain that never went through a security review.
Cloud access security brokers provide ongoing visibility into which cloud applications your employees are using. Network monitoring can identify traffic patterns that indicate unknown SaaS usage.
Making the Official Path Easier
People turn to shadow IT because the approved process is too slow or too restrictive. If getting a new tool approved takes six weeks of paperwork, employees will find a faster way.
Streamline your procurement process for low-risk tools. Create a pre-approved catalogue of SaaS applications that have passed security review. Make it faster and easier to use the approved option than to go rogue.
Bringing Shadow IT Into the Light
When you discover shadow IT, avoid punishing the people who set it up. They were trying to solve a business problem. Instead, work with them to migrate to a managed, secure alternative.
Conduct web application penetration testing on any shadow applications that will remain in use to ensure they meet your security standards. Decommission anything that duplicates existing approved tools.
Shadow IT is a symptom of friction between security requirements and business needs. Reducing that friction is more effective than trying to enforce restrictions that people will work around.
