July - 2016 - issue > CXO INSIGHT

From Shadow to Sunshine - The Cloud Journey Evolves

Ashwin Krishnan

SVP Product Management and Strategy-HyTrust

Monday, July 11, 2016

Forward

Much has been said and written about Shadow IT and the nightmares that employees cause to IT - remember those employees of questionable morals lurking the hallways looking around furtively before they dash off to the cloud through an exit door that IT never even knew existed - or blessed. Seriously these employees are everywhere - this is you and I and everyone else who has ever spun up an unofficial cloud service without working with IT. But those days are fast becoming the exception than the norm - shadow IT was the topic of yesterday, today it is about sunny IT - the IT that embraces cloud and champions and encourages employees to do the same. But this journey from the shadow to the sun does not have a prescribed path, there is no precedent so many enterprises are left to fend for themselves.

What is so different when comparing shadow IT to sunny IT. Let's take a step back and see what IT was mostly concerned about when it came to shadow IT.

1. Visibility - Need to know who, what and where for access to public cloud. Typically these are employees or departments who have opened a Dropbox, EC2 or Office 365 account to achieve their goals.

2. Enforcement - Need to apply IT policies to these backdoors SaaS offerings. This could include blocking, limiting e.g. can read but not write, throw up warnings etc.

3. Compliance - Generate fancy reports to show the auditors that the IT risk assessment has been met (even though in reality the compliance may not reduce the actual risk the enterprise faces).