Discovering and managing shadow IT

Reliable inventory is foundational to cybersecurity. We need to know what devices, identities, and infrastructure we have to adequately secure them and reduce the attack surface. With this in mind, ask yourself: do you know your cloud app inventory? Cloud apps is the umbrella term for web apps and SaaS. While you’re probably aware your business uses services such as Office 365 and some others, you probably won’t know it all, and this problem will grow as your organization grows.

We call this type of unknown, unmanaged IT and cloud app usage shadow IT. It poses a risk because the following generally haven’t occurred:

• Legal assessments, such as data residency and ownership policy
• Security assessments, such as support for single sign-on (SSO) and admin audit trails
• Internal compliance assessments, such as disaster recovery plans

Most shadow IT usage is simply users trying to get their job done as quickly...