The disturbing trend of shadow IT continues to pop up in all corners of the enterprise. This is mostly due to the availability of new, easy-to-use applications that have been placed at employees’ fingertips thanks to the ubiquity of the cloud and mobile devices. As a result, if an organization doesn’t respond to employee demands, workers are more willing and capable than ever to go around IT to obtain, deploy and use the tools they want on their own.
Case in point: The widespread use of enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) services.
When it comes to accessing, sharing and collaborating on required documents and files, often from legacy applications that aren’t typically mobile-enabled, employees demand the simplicity they experience with other mobile apps. This is what they get from the likes of Box and Dropbox, the file sync-and-share tools they use at home. So when IT is slow to respond because it has other priorities (say supporting critical applications) employees solve the problem on their own by downloading these tools themselves.