Will worries of “shadow IT” derail cloud rollouts?

The story is all too common.

Tired of clearing his inbox all the time because he only has 100MB of storage, an employee signs up for a Gmail account and forwards all his office e-mail to his private mailbox, which gives him more than 7GB of space and never bugs him to delete anything.

Separately, another employee, who hates it that his company does not let him read e-mail on the go, also forwards his office e-mail to a Google account, which can be retrieved easily on his iPhone.

The result of such exploits, common in so many organisations, is a breach of security and, in some industries where information has to be kept under lock and key, a breach of their compliance with local laws.

“Shadow IT”, however, is not only caused by rogue users in an organisation, but can be part of a poorly-planned cloud rollout that could compromise a company’s security and compliance, according to a survey conducted by HP Enterprise Services.

While cloud computing offers agility and fast response, the study revealed a worry among top executives that a “free rein” could lead to users tapping on IT resources that jeopardise the organisation they work for. …