Many of us are familiar with the term Shadow IT. Most often, the term is used to refer to technology systems, software, subscriptions, and other services that are used by employees of a particular company without the overall approval, knowledge, or oversight by the company’s official IT department. Most often, these systems, services, or subscriptions are downloaded and installed, or used and managed by individuals outside of the IT department.
For example, perhaps your company officially uses Windows 365, but others prefer Dropbox, so they configured a Dropbox account to share files instead of OneDrive. Another example of Shadow IT occurs when a company has settled on one messaging platform, but other teams or departments within the company download and configure Zoom for Slack or WhatsApp.
Common Examples of Shadow IT in the Workplace
Shadow IT occurs in many different areas, from messaging to meetings, coding tools to storage. While most teams and organizations that have some form of Shadow IT do not deploy them maliciously or with evil intent, the presence of Shadow IT nevertheless introduces risks.
These services, software, systems, and subscriptions introduce potential risks, including:
- Security issues
- Data compliance
- Support challenges
- Management and maintenance issues (due to sprawl)
- Additional cost (licensing and manpower)
How Shadow IT Impacts High Availability (HA)
In addition to security and data compliance risks, Shadow IT may also be introducing a significant High Availability (HA) risk.
While many examples of Shadow IT mentioned online are related to messaging applications, meeting tools, IDEs, and development applications, the breadth of Shadow IT can also impact High Availability (HA). When Shadow IT includes the deployment of systems that store critical information and data, this creates a High Availability risk.
These systems, because of the nature of the data stored on them, need to be monitored and protected by a commercial HA solution. In addition, critical data that is essential to business functions needs to be highly available and protected against data loss by a replication solution, backup solution, or both.
Business Risks of Unprotected Shadow IT Critical Applications
Lack of High Availability Protection
Often, when a team has deployed a system without input or authorization from IT, it may not be monitored, protected, backed up, or even paired with a HA system for failover recovery. This is a significant risk to the organization’s HA strategy. If the data is critical for an internal organization or project, leaving it unprotected could jeopardize the business.
Financial Losses and Business Disruption from Shadow IT Downtime
Shadow IT risks also arise when essential applications are downloaded, installed, and configured without the official IT department’s oversight. If essential applications are running on an unprotected system or without HA monitoring and recovery protection, the risks and results can be catastrophic. Imagine the scenario where an application is essential to the Sales workflow and orders system. Because the software is a part of Shadow IT Infrastructure, the IT team has no knowledge of its use or its impact on the business. If the application fails, the business will be impacted. Depending on the type of failure, the impact on operations could cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
When the critical application fails, without proper HA protection, the manual recovery process can be cumbersome, complex, and prone to errors. This risk to the operation is due in part to the growing complexity of application environments and technical requirements. Exacerbating the complexity, when an application falls into the category of Shadow IT, the limited knowledge of the application’s existence and recovery procedures can lead to unplanned and unprepared actions to restore full operation.
Steps to Identify and Eliminate Shadow IT HA Problems
Identify All Shadow IT Systems That Impact High Availability
The first step in avoiding HA disasters due to Shadow IT is to identify the subscriptions, services, systems, applications, data, and software that have become a part of the unmanaged IT infrastructure. Gain visibility into what tools are being used, by whom, and for what purpose.
This can be done by utilizing existing network monitoring, cloud monitoring, or endpoint detection tools. You can also engage with the IT security and infrastructure analysis service vendors to perform a helpful audit of tools, services, systems, and subscriptions.
Remediate Risks and Remove Unnecessary Shadow IT Assets
Once this identification has been done, the next step is to start with remediation. Remediation includes eliminating unused and unnecessary systems as well as implementing controls and processes for the administration of each acquired item. Be sure to adjust workflows for eliminated systems, as the removal of systems can impact several teams and activities within the organization.
Protect Critical Applications with High Availability and Replication
For systems, applications, and services that must remain, especially those housing critical data and applications, deploy a commercially available HA and replication solution to protect the business from the key threats of application downtime, data loss, system unavailability, and downtime of the systems hosting the critical data, applications, or tools.
Educate Teams on the Risks of Shadow IT to HA Systems
Lastly, educate the organization about the dangers and risks associated with Shadow IT, including the risks due to dependencies, architecture complexities, data vulnerability, and unexpected downtime of unprotected systems.
Build a Resilient HA Architecture to Eliminate Shadow IT Downtime
Shadow IT is not limited to meeting and messaging tools, development systems and services, nor apps like Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, and online services. Shadow IT tools often lack proper backup and recovery mechanisms, as well as uptime guarantees. As a result, critical business processes and data could be inaccessible or even permanently lost due to a failure scenario. When not officially integrated into HA protection, failures at the system, application, network, or storage layer can lead to broken workflows, inefficiencies in processing, or business downtime and reputational loss.
Eliminate Shadow IT HA problems by creating a well-architected HA environment for the systems, services, applications, and workloads that your company identifies and chooses to incorporate into the official IT department offerings. This architecture should include a commercially available HA, data replication, and backup solution that is deployed on an enterprise-ready hypervisor.
Ready to strengthen your HA architecture with proven expertise? Request a demo today and see how SIOS can help you design and deploy a high availability solution that protects your business from Shadow IT downtime.
Author: Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience
