Top Tips to Eliminate Shadow IT

In large organizations keeping systems in order and enforcing policies is one of the biggest challenges system administrators face today. Even with established policies, many organizations are struggling to address the problems from ‘shadow IT’ – the process of employees using their tools and software to perform their jobs.

Following are a few ways you can overcome the threat of shadow IT within your organization:

Detect the threats

Once you’ve put together your action plan on handling shadow IT, you can focus on expunging the threats. The best way to rapidly spot issues are through monitoring your server connections and account logins (attempted and successful). You’ll also want to check with your help desk to ensure nobody is asking questions about connecting to third-party services or inquiring about new applications.~The key point here is that technical tools alone can’t solve all your IT issues. Having effective communication between departments is essential for tackling any IT challenge.

Fix the problem

Once you’ve sized up the scope of the problem, you’ll need to educate your employees and help them through the transition. Your IT teams can’t do this themselves. By working with department managers, you can focus on the technical side of the transition while management focuses on explaining the policies to their teams.The biggest point to focus on with the new training is the ease of using preferred devices.

Simplify device testing

Since employees upgrade their personal devices more frequently than enterprises, your system administrators need to have the resources to test devices in a timely matter. While it’s tempting to brush these processes off, proper test processes are essential to preventing trouble down the road. The first step to streamlining the process is to identify the potential threats to your network and the potential fallout from a breach. Policies should be structured based on employee level and department.

Once you have these policies in place, you need to make device testing a priority. While it’s not necessarily as pressing as optimizing your systems, ignoring employee requests only worsens the shadow IT problem. Implementing network monitoring software within your enterprise is an excellent way to free up admin time so they can handle requests in a timely fashion.

While these tips are geared towards enterprise system administrators as a whole, if you’re working in the finance, medical, or legal industries, you need to consider how compliance issues affect BYOD policies.~Are there any tips that you'd like to share with us? Feel free to share them on our community forums.

Happy Monitoring!