Shadow IT Expanding Within Federal IT Environments
August 07, 2015

Joel Dolisy
SolarWinds

Share this

Shadow IT and mobile device use continues to expand within federal IT environments, while some IT pros lack control and confidence in their ability to manage the accompanying security risks, according to a SolarWinds survey on the current state of government IT management and monitoring. The survey also found that adoption and benefits of IT shared services are overcoming organizational resistance.

Not Enough Leadership Focus on Shadow IT

While only 12 percent of respondents indicated that shadow IT — when IT systems and solutions are built and used inside organizations without explicit organizational approval — is an area of high importance and leadership focus in their agency, nearly six in ten (58%) expect the use of shadow IT to increase in the next two years.

■ Shadow IT ranked second among areas that IT departments have least control over in terms of management and monitoring

■ Only 13 percent of respondents are very confident in their ability to protect against the negative consequences of shadow IT

■ A majority of respondents (71%) indicate that security consequences are the biggest issue with shadow IT, followed by duplication of IT efforts (50%), lack of interoperability (37%) and lack of adequate performance monitoring (36%)

■ Organizations using management and monitoring tools are significantly more confident than those who do not in their ability to protect against the negative consequences of shadow IT

Low Confidence in Data Protection Persists

Thirty-six percent of respondents indicate that only agency-owned mobile devices are allowed to access to their systems, but 80 percent of respondents still believe that mobile devices pose a threat to their agency’s security and 35 percent don’t provide security training for mobile device users.

■ Only 25 percent of respondents are very confident in their agency’s ability to effectively protect their organization’s data

■ The majority of respondents utilize data encryption (65%), firewall rule audits (60%), mobile device wiping (55%), mobile application inventory and authorization (52%), and two-factor authentication to secure mobile devices (52%), but at least 35 percent of respondent haven’t fully implemented any of these solutions

■ Respondents indicated that securing both the application and the device (43%) was the most challenging aspect of mobile technology security followed by ensuring devices are not infected by malware (37%) and that data is not accessed by unauthorized users (36%)

IT Shared Services Gain Traction and Deliver Benefits

Despite perceived concerns that IT shared services would compromise security, performance and control, more than half of respondents see them as beneficial to all agency stakeholders, including IT department personnel, end users, agency leadership and citizens/constituents .

■ Respondents rated the key benefits of shared services as saving money by eliminating duplication (60%), achieving economies of scale (54%) and standardized IT services for consistent performance (52%)

■ More than 80 percent believe that either an internal shared services model or an outsourced private partnership is most likely to provide superior customer service versus no shared services

■ The biggest widespread adoption barriers for shared services include cultural resistance to change (56%), perceived decreased flexibility (37%) and lack of executive buy-in (37%)

Fully securing a federal IT environment will undoubtedly remain a key concern for IT pros, and as control issues creep in with shadow IT and the mass adoption of mobile devices, security is brought to the management forefront. Agency leaders must not only provide their IT pros with the right tools to maintain control and security of their infrastructure, but remain flexible in considering operational and organizational changes like IT shared services that can help institute agency-wide security protocols and more.

“SolarWinds’ study provides detailed insight into how federal IT pros are adapting, managing and assuring oversight as shadow IT, mobile technology and shared services continue to grow in their environments,” concludes Laurie Morrow, Director of Research Services, Market Connections, Inc. “This research reinforces that fully implementing multiple management, monitoring and security tools provides significantly more control and confidence throughout IT organizations in the wake of this change.”

Joel Dolisy is CIO and CTO at SolarWinds.

Share this

The Latest

March 27, 2024

Nearly all (99%) globa IT decision makers, regardless of region or industry, recognize generative AI's (GenAI) transformative potential to influence change within their organizations, according to The Elastic Generative AI Report ...

March 27, 2024

Agent-based approaches to real user monitoring (RUM) simply do not work. If you are pitched to install an "agent" in your mobile or web environments, you should run for the hills ...

March 26, 2024

The world is now all about end-users. This paradigm of focusing on the end-user was simply not true a few years ago, as backend metrics generally revolved around uptime, SLAs, latency, and the like. DevOps teams always pitched and presented the metrics they thought were the most correlated to the end-user experience. But let's be blunt: Unless there was an egregious fire, the correlated metrics were super loose or entirely false ...

March 25, 2024

This year, New Relic published the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance Report to share insights derived from the 2023 Observability Forecast on the adoption and business value of observability across the financial services industry (FSI) and insurance sectors. Here are seven key takeaways from the report ...

March 22, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 2, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and AIOps ...

March 21, 2024

In the course of EMA research over the last twelve years, the message for IT organizations looking to pursue a forward path in AIOps adoption is overall a strongly positive one. The benefits achieved are growing in diversity and value ...

March 20, 2024

Today, as enterprises transcend into a new era of work, surpassing the revolution, they must shift their focus and strategies to thrive in this environment. Here are five key areas that organizations should prioritize to strengthen their foundation and steer themselves through the ever-changing digital world ...

March 19, 2024

If there's one thing we should tame in today's data-driven marketing landscape, this would be data debt, a silent menace threatening to undermine all the trust you've put in the data-driven decisions that guide your strategies. This blog aims to explore the true costs of data debt in marketing operations, offering four actionable strategies to mitigate them through enhanced marketing observability ...

March 18, 2024

Gartner has highlighted the top trends that will impact technology providers in 2024: Generative AI (GenAI) is dominating the technical and product agenda of nearly every tech provider ...

March 15, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 4 - Part 1, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) discusses artificial intelligence and network management ...