Last week, Gartner published their Top 10 cloud security predictions for 2016. They predict that “by 2020, one third of successful attacks experienced by enterprises will be on their shadow IT resources.” As Gartner rightly points out, the reality is your business is engaging with shadow IT resources and they shoot a big hole in […]
As I shared in my last blog, cloud use is rampant, pervasive, exploding! As a short recap, large organization are now using an average of 1,220 cloud services (most unknown to IT departments). The tremendous spike in cloud service usage presents challenges for IT including higher business risks, costs, and a shortage of IT resources […]
When wireless for LAN burst onto the scene, companies were a lot slower than their employees to embrace it. Employees didn’t want to be tied to their desks. So they brought in their own wireless access points, stashing them under desks and in conference rooms. Soon companies began realizing they had a big mess of […]
I’ve spent a lot of time on the road over the last few months. Europe. Asia. Canada. Latin America. And everywhere I go I talk to our partners. The one constant: frustration over their ability to have a deep conversation with customers about cloud. Partners have told me their customers want to hear how they […]
Today, most employees access public cloud solutions by bypassing IT. This is concerning for CIOs/CEOs given that it puts their organizations at substantial risk for data security and compliance challenges. But, what if it isn’t actually the public cloud that you need to worry about? What if it’s your own internal processes that are the […]
Last week I was in London and Amsterdam, where I had a fantastic time meeting with customers and cloud partners. During the conversations I had with customers and partners, shadow IT was continuously recognized as a challenge. However, most were not sure of how, or if, they should take actual action. Why? Some IT managers […]
Did you know it pays to optimize your cloud strategy? (Literally) A recent IDC/Cisco report shows that key business indicators (top-line revenues, strategic IT budget allocations, greater IT asset flexibility) all increased with a better cloud strategy. You see this in the results. On average, companies who optimized their cloud experienced: 4% increase in revenue […]
Recently, I had a conversation with a CIO and her team. We were reviewing the extraordinary growth of unknown and known cloud services within organizations like hers. She turned to her team and asked “well what should we do?” Some of her leaders said: “we can’t control it, so why should we discover it?” Others […]
We’ve known for years that employees and lines of business are bypassing IT departments to get the cloud services they want. The good news is we can finally quantify how much shadow IT exists in an organization and identify any risks. Large customers actually use 730 individual cloud services on average—with some using over 1,000. […]
