IT’s Dirty Little Secret: “We’re aware of ‘Shadow IT’, we just can’t stop it”

> While nearly two-thirds of companies (60 percent)report they have corporate policies in place that prohibit such actions, respondents say there are no real deterrents for purchasing cloud services by stealth. In fact, 29 percent report there are no ramifications whatsoever and another 48 percent say it is little more than a warning.

If it's such a big deal that employees are using Dropbox in the office, employ some of those Orwellian tactics bigcorps are so good at: block them. Block them and their entire CDN. Shut off access to Facebook, Google Drive and Box while you're at it. Make them use only corporate e-mail. Is being denied access (at work) to a service they purchased not ramification enough?

Shall we draw and quarter them instead? You're not powerless, you're just myopic.

I'd wager that if a corporation has a problem with employees using Dropbox, they've got problems with a lot of other stuff - so why not stamp it all out at once? Or, work with it! Embrace the growing cloud culture. Buy Dropbox for Teams, or Github Enterprise, or what have you. Clearly, your employees want it.

Or, disband the thought and grow up.

EDIT: Comment below generated while the site was not responding to requests.

> 503 Service Unavailable

It appears the "Shadow IT" has won this round.

From an iPhone, but the problem has resolved itself. Thanks!

Is this a situation of people not having the resources or permission to do the jobs for which they were hired?

So these people are trying to get a job done despite their manager's actions. A manager's job is to remove roadblocks to getting things done. In this situation, the manager needs to self-remove.

The described IT painfully reminds me of Soviet-style planned economy. It tries to be the only economy in tow", but as it falls behind due to inefficiency, it tries hard to suppress any other economies that try to arise.

And of course it is done in the name of security! Obviously everyone is trying to steal your secrets and that's why you have to live in outdated and broken environment.

I am not sure partitioning networks the way the military does is going to work very well. What is going to happen when a mid-level manager has a meeting, he is running late, and he just needs to get his powerpoint set out of the internal network? He's either going to miss that meeting or fail to close the deal, at which point the policy is getting in the way of business (and will therefore be short-lived), or he's going to find that one crack that lets him get some data out (more likely).

The reason red/black networks (can potentially) work in military environments is that there is a (somewhat) uniform notion of classification in the military; in the business world, there is no such thing. What is needed is something more distributed, like a system that automatically encrypts documents so that uploading those documents to some Internet service is not so hazardous. Give employees smartcards that are easily carried around and easy to use, perhaps combining those smartcards with a thumb drive that contains whatever software they need to decrypt their documents on any computer. The security will not be perfect, but this is not a situation that requires perfection, only improvement.