TYPES OF SHADOW IT
Shadow IT is most likely to manifest itself in your organisation, with the associated threats they introduce.
Unmanaged devices
A widely understood area of shadow IT is unsanctioned devices on a network. This can include:
- personal devices belonging to employees on the core enterprise network
- equipment providing a critical service that is incorrectly configured
- IoT or other smart devices employees have introduced without approval (smart doorbells, digital assistants, printers.)
- wifi access points to provide coverage or types of access that the organisation has not provided
- servers or VMs brought in by an employee (or contractor) to provide a service
Any device or service that’s not been configured by your organisation will probably fall short of the required standards, and could damage the network and your services (by introducing malware, for example). They could also be added into botnets or become cryptominers, causing additional damage.
Unmanaged services
Less well understood are shadow cloud services. This can include:
- unapproved messaging or video conferencing services with no monitoring in place
- external cloud storage services to share files with third parties (or to allow staff to work from home using an unauthorised device)
- using third-party tools that could be gathering corporate information
- unmanaged cloud tenancies used by developers as testing environments
- project management or planning services used as an alternative to corporate tooling
- code stored in unmanaged repositories
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