The growing pains of Shadow IT

Gigaom Research and CipherCloud have announced the results of their “Shadow IT: data protection and cloud security” study. The research examined the extent of enterprises’ cloud adoption, their challenges and security concerns and growing prevalence of shadow IT.

“Organisations are moving beyond curiosity about the cloud to actual deployment,” said George Crump, Gigaom Research analyst. “SaaS is growing at 199 percent and is the typical home for shadow IT. It is growing because end-users are impatient with IT and looking for alternatives.”

Adoption of the Cloud is Accelerating
The results of the study indicate that cloud market will grow 126.5 percent this year with the majority of the growth in two areas - Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) growing at 199 percent and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) at 126 percent.

Top Risks Identified with Cloud Adoption
Security is the number one cloud adoption concern with 62 percent selecting is as the top concern. Second at 44 percent were the performance of those applications, and third at 41 percent was the time needed to develop cloud related skills. The study found that IT professional consider encryption as the the key aspect of security. By encryption it must be end to end from the moment that the data leaves the network to the data being stored at rest in the cloud.

Number of Cloud Applications Adopted
Over half of survey respondents reported that they had more than 10 cloud applications in production, with a notable 32 percent indicating significant use of 51 or more cloud applications. This only includes the cloud applications that IT is aware of and controls; it does not include Shadow IT cloud instances.

Growth of Shadow IT
One of the big challenges is having visibility into cloud adoption within their organisation. Among line of business employees 81 admitted to using unauthorised SaaS applications. 38 percent of employees deliberately went around IT in adopting applications because of IT approval process in their companies is reportedly to slow.

Most Popular Cloud Applications
The study revealed that the most common requested cloud applications were those related to communications, file-sync-and-share, and disaster recovery followed rapidly by CRM and other sales automation tools.

"The research underscores the rapid adoption of the cloud by businesses both by IT and line of business employees," said Paige Leidig, Chief Marketing Officer, CipherCloud. “It also reinforces security as a key concern and the importance of encryption to ensure data is fully protected and controlled.”

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