A Better Way To Manage Shadow IT and Promote Healthy Cloud Adoption

We are proud to announce a new level of cloud application visibility, insight, and blocking which is now available as part of the Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) solution.*
Shadow IT SaaS use has exploded and it represents a significant challenge for IT, Security and business leaders. Most organizations have hundreds of apps that were adopted without visibility from the IT or Security team and this quickly leads to app sprawl and other negative side effects, such as:

• App overlap and reduced productivity
• Additional unquantified risk from apps and the data stored in them
• Redundancy with existing IT services
• Extra expenses for multiple apps with the same functionality

Shadow IT can’t be stopped completely, and that shouldn’t be the goal in a fast moving, digital workplace. It’s good to have an empowered employees that can easily adopt apps to help improve productivity.  The challenge is to maximize the positive aspects of Shadow IT while controlling the negative elements by helping your organization expose cloud app activity and manage it.  To do that you must have:

• Ongoing visibility of the cloud apps in use
• The ability to organize apps by category, risk level and usage
• Insight into the vendors, apps and risk/compliance details
• A simple way to block categories or individual apps by network, group or individual user

  

Cisco Umbrella now has new functionality to improve visibility, provide the necessary vendor, application and risk insight, plus optimization workflows including the ability to block individual apps or app categories.
So let’s change the attitude from one of fearing the darkness of Shadow IT and looking for complete control, to one of informed decision making which takes into account the department or user’s needs, as well as the security requirements. This approach will make both the parties more productive and promote the type of shared responsibility that is going to be required as you continue to consume more cloud services.

Adopting this approach can help change the impression of the IT and Security team’s role. Instead of being looked at as the bad guy, chasing users around, they can now be seen as more of a partner enabling and guiding healthy cloud adoption.
Click here to see how the new App Discovery and blocking capabilities in Cisco Umbrella can help you quickly and easily enable secure cloud adoption within your organization.
 *All new and existing Platform customers and new Insights customers have access now. Existing Insights customers will be activated over the next six weeks.