Certain psychological schools of thought posit the existence of “the shadow,” a scary figure which lurks in the darkness of the psyche affecting everything we do.
The decentralized, virtualized environment which now characterizes business IT architecture has also given rise to a shadow. And just like its psychological counterpart, so-called shadow IT operates out of sight of business management and can sometimes appear dangerously out of control. It can be painful to look at but if IT professionals fail to deal with shadow IT, it has the potential to do severe damage in terms of data loss and non-compliance fines.