What is Shadow IT? A Guide for UK Small Businesses

Introduction

Sometimes, life tries to tell you something.

Whether it’s the nagging backache that means it’s time for a trip to the chiropractor or that rattle in your car’s engine you’ve been ignoring for months, ignoring the signs can sometimes be a bad a move.

In this spirit, we’d like to focus on the lesser-known concept of ‘shadow IT’ with this article.

The most basic description of shadow IT is when employees start installing and managing hardware and software without the knowledge of the IT support team (or person), but there’s a lot more to shadow IT than that.

Is your team trying to tell you something with the way they manage their own IT? Let’s find out.

What is shadow IT?

Have you ever thought something could just be done better? That’s the core concept behind shadow IT. It’s an unusual concept but it’s based on the idea of ‘the path of least resistance.

Shadow IT refers to employees taking IT into their own hands, subverting the IT support team or person and installing or managing their own IT solutions.

As an example of shadow IT, imagine a team who are equipped only with email by the company they work for. It’s asynchronous, so it can take time for emails to be picked up and responded to. In order to save time, this team installs an app like Microsoft Teams or Slack in order to chat to each other instantly and solve problems faster. Importantly, they do this outside of the IT support team’s knowledge, so while they’re technically making a process improvement, they’re not doing it through official channels. This is the very definition of shadow IT.

But is it a good thing or a bad thing for a business?  

Are there any benefits to shadow IT?

It may seem at first blush that shadow IT is an exclusively negative thing. After all, inexperienced users managing systems with no co-ordination from a central IT support team seems like a recipe for disaster – and sometimes it can be (as we’ll see).

But shadow IT can bring some benefits to a business, even if they’re blessings in disguise.

• It helps IT support teams understand their users. Sometimes, IT support teams can become siloed and lose communication with the larger employee base. Shadow IT allows and IT support team to understand exactly what the user want (and why).
  
  
• It fuels innovation. Shadow IT may also highlight ways of doing things which a business owner or manager may not have considered before.
  
  
• It can highlight IT security holes. For example, employees may have got into the habit of emailing files to themselves at home for easy access. In this case, an IT support team could implement a secure way to work remotely (like Microsoft OneDrive) rather than having the team rely on insecure data sharing.

What are the downsides of shadow IT?

While there are some benefits to shadow IT, especially when it comes to shedding light on areas IT support teams could make changes, there are also plenty of drawbacks.

Here’s why shadow IT shouldn’t be encouraged, even if it does have some benefits:

• It wastes human resources. If teams like Marketing or HR are spending time managing software solutions to ‘work around’ an IT bottleneck, they’ll have less time to spend doing their actual jobs, and that will impact the bottom line.
  
  
• It’s a compliance nightmare. One of the biggest concerns an IT support team would have about shadow IT is the fact that software and hardware is being deployed in ways that (probably) doesn’t comply with industry and cyber security best practices. This creates a threat for the business and every single user as well.
  
  
• There’s no consistency. When setting up their own systems isolated from a central IT support department or person, siloed teams will do things ‘their own way’. This means any compliance and security policies you have in place may be ignored, exposing potential paths for malware.
  
  
• The IT support team won’t have complete visibility. One of the most essential attributes of a successful IT support team is the ability to have oversight of all areas of the business’s IT. Whether that’s hardware, software, user configuration, cloud storage – all of this is part of their remit. When users are doing things their own way, IT won’t be able to see it, meaning if a problem crops up, they may not even know it’s there.
  
  
• It damages company morale. When the IT team feel like their job is being done by someone else, or feel their decisions aren’t trusted, it can lead to unease in the ranks and low morale. That said, this could also be a reason to go for an outsourced IT support team instead.  

Don’t rely on shadow IT – speak to the IT support experts

It should be clear now that shadow IT isn’t always a bad thing, though it is a good indicator for your IT support team that they might want to change their tactics. In fact, it might also be an indicator that you need a little more help with your IT in general.

If so, we’d invite you to explore our IT support agreements, designed from the ground up to fit your company’s specific requirements to the letter – no shadow IT tactics required.

To learn more about our IT support agreements, check out our dedicated webpage or call the team today on 01865 594 000. Alternatively, just pop your details in the form below and we’ll get back to you.