Why legitimizing shadow IT opens doors for cloud innovation
The IT landscape is determined by macro and micro challenges, and will continue to be so in the future. This will impact IT’s ability to be innovative and drive business value. To overcome these issues, cloud services have the potential to be that ‘great enabler’, enabling great flexibility and scalability across all operations.
However, organizations’ hybrid multi-cloud landscapes are currently in an unwieldy tangle that is expensive and time-consuming to maintain. This has created a cloud conundrum that exacerbates some of IT’s biggest problems, such as cybersecurity skills shortages and vulnerabilities.
Furthermore, clouds are assumed to be largely the same, when in fact cloud platforms are all subtly different and require the right skills in any multi-cloud environment. As a result, customers are caught in the middle of deploying and optimizing their cloud services, with challenges around workload portability and the skills required to adopt and maintain multi-cloud.
Before we explore some of the IT practices that can help overcome this cloud conundrum, let’s take a closer look at the cloud challenges facing the IT industry.
Lead Specialist Solution Architect at Red Hat.
Today’s cloud challenges
Cloud adoption was once heralded as a budget-friendly solution. However, if applied and managed incorrectly, it can become a costly solution for many organizations. Unfortunately, we’re seeing unclear pricing structures and complicated cloud management challenges, all of which have led to unexpected increases in costs.
Additionally, as developers are pressured to adopt a product mindset, there is increasing frustration with any barriers around their cloud workspace, as these barriers hinder their ability to develop with ease. Widespread concerns about inadequate development tools and processes are also increasing pressure on departmental budgets, turning the promise of the cloud into a mind-boggling financial puzzle.
The solution lies in legitimizing shadow IT
Shadow IT has the potential to help solve these cloud problems. Let’s first explore the concept itself, as Shadow IT’s reputation is not all positive.
In summary, shadow IT involves employees going outside of company-sanctioned IT services to solve problems and use the technology, software or cloud platforms they need to do their jobs well. It’s not a new principle and according to analysts, reports and experienced CIOs, most organizations have elements of shadow IT running in their environments.
However, opinions about Shadow IT vary. Typically, shadow IT is viewed as a disparate, uncontrolled, and confusing mix of technology with inherent gaps and duplication. But far from being a threat, shadow IT is actually an opportunity.
Rethinking Shadow IT
By giving shadow IT legitimacy, organizations can simplify application delivery and allow developers to focus on what matters most: delivering key applications that quickly deliver business value. In turn, they can seamlessly identify and enable services and platforms that deliver value, around which organizations can unite to create acceptable standardized solutions.
If employees ultimately adopt an unauthorized application in the form of shadow IT, they are likely doing so because it brings valuable benefits – from accelerating DevOps to unlocking innovation with new features. These benefits will differentiate competitors, and if organizations want to reap the benefits, they must look to remove the friction around their entry.
Rather than turning away from the use of shadow IT, organizations should leverage the applications and create a path that allows revised technology to be used in the route to production. Using cloud platforms can securely support this type of innovation, development and experimentation. We need to move the needle and rethink shadow IT, shining a more positive light on how its legitimization can drive business innovation and cloud development.
With this legitimization comes the introduction of more applications into a company’s existing selection. To integrate these smoothly and ensure that an organization optimizes the tools, they must adopt a platform approach that abstracts as much from the user as possible. Platform-as-a-product emerged as a way for organizations to embrace this new generation of IT stacks to simplify the process for users. With platform management and a technology abstraction layer sitting on top of the platform, organizations can better manage the technology stack needed for developers, administrators, and operations teams to complete their tasks.
Using shadow IT to solve customer challenges
Endorsing Shadow IT enables experimentation, flexibility, and scalability, providing developers with a dynamic space where they can embrace open source and foster a product mindset. Having a product mindset will help understand the requirements of those turning to shadow IT, and provide platforms that address these changing needs. This also promotes a collaborative and robust security environment within organizations. Further benefits of legitimizing shadow IT include:
- Ensuring a secure hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem, because it is better to legitimize the desire to use new applications than to let them run in the shadows, where the risks only increase.
- Allowing cloud independence, as companies are not tied to one cloud platform or technology, allowing companies to grow and expand without limits. Users can access what they need to succeed and the organization can focus on achieving higher innovation goals, including the use of AI and edge computing.
- Adding value to customers, because this innovation that allows organizations to adopt new technology also means that they can deliver more and more value. This in turn opens up new avenues to market, partnerships, customer retention, loyalty, NPS improvements and increased market share.
- Enable cloud innovation within teams by making the mix of cloud services widely available and easy to use. This will reduce external burden so that broader teams can accelerate their use and adoption of cloud technologies to deliver excellent IT applications for their users.
There is no doubt that innovation will remain at the top of the agenda for a long time to come. To drive innovation forward, organizations must view shadow IT as a glimpse into the future of IT and not as a hindrance.
Forward-thinking companies must embrace change and leverage cloud platforms to securely nurture their shadow IT pioneers. In turn, encouraging experimentation can help foster a culture of creativity and drive transformative change.
We’ve highlighted the best IT management tool.
This article was produced as part of Ny BreakingPro’s Expert Insights channel, where we profile the best and brightest minds in today’s technology industry. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Ny BreakingPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing, you can read more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro