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Shadows of Things That Have Been

Tal Klein

"Spirit!" said Scrooge in a broken voice, "remove me from this place."
"I told you these were shadows of the things that have been," said the Ghost. "That they

are what they are, do not blame me!" – from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol

The holiday season is traditionally a time of reflection. As the year draws to a close and another
looms on the near horizon, it makes sense to both look back on what was and what may yet be.

In Charles Dickens’ classic holiday yarn A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge endures a
night’s reflective haunting and is changed for the better because of it. When it comes to the way
enterprises address Shadow IT, let us hope 2015 see us put things in their proper perspective

and stop wasting time and money fretting over Shadow IT.

If you don’t want to take it from me, Verizon’s 2014 State of the Market: Enterprise Cloud report

pronounced Shadow IT dead as a business risk. Instead, the report touted the adoption of cloud
services as essential to efficiency and innovation.

The fear behind Shadow IT has been rooted in the idea that armies of rogue users are hunkered
down in their cubicles downloading applications willy-nilly and storing petabytes of sensitive

corporate data in the cloud, unprotected. This just isn’t the case. In their Cloud Adoption and
Risk Report, Skyhigh Networks found that, while the average enterprise used 831 cloud
services, 80 percent of corporate data uploaded to the cloud was stored in just one percent of

those applications. Adallom’s own annual Cloud Usage Risk Report confirmed this finding,
identifying four primary services used for storing enterprise files in the cloud: Box, Office 365,
Salesforce, and Google Apps.

Not one of these respected and broadly adopted services, comprising the largest attack surface

for data in the cloud, fits the definition of Shadow IT. To the contrary; the status quo has pivoted
so profoundly that these services are more likely to be sanctioned by IT than traditional IT
services.

74 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – December 2014 Edition
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