Shadow Cloud Apps - Honesty Hurts
Honesty hurts.
“You're being too suffocating. You're focused on your own goals not mine. You have a control issue. You don't listen to me; you just say no because you don't want to be bothered. You don't have enough time for me. I'm a unique snowflake and you are trying to fit me to a mold that I was never made to fit.”
Okay, I took some poetic license with the last one, but chances are that your IT shop (and most others) is guilty of a few of the aforementioned accusations.
IT has its own set of goals and concerns that must come first. When these facts come into conflict with your user’s needs or wants, then something has got to give.
It will start simply enough – a Dropbox install here, a Google Drive collaboration there. And if you still don't listen to your users you will wake up to the marketing department launching a Drupal site on Amazon Web Services using their credit card to hide it from you until it’s too late to salvage the relationship.
The immediate reaction is often the wrong one: Lock the doors, nail the windows shut and force your users to love you again. However, in reality, there are only a few valid use cases for this coping mechanism: PII data, confidential data, and national security. After that, there isn't much of a leg to stand on.
Be honest and hit the problem head on.
Personal cloud applications will be the first things that trickle in under the gate, among those data storage apps and file sharing apps tend to march in first. Take a good hard look at these responses and decide on the following tactics, based entirely on your data security needs:
- No means NO: You are a shop that deals primarily in restrictive data. You have extensive logging and controls because the law says you must. Identify the offending services, and then launch internal services that meet as many of your users needs as possible. You're going to have to talk to you audience to succeed. Don't assume you can dictate terms. You are going to have to deliver functionality or you will spend a larger & larger percentage of your time ferreting out shadow cloud IT apps.
- Talk it out: A cloud storage app performs many of the same functions as a briefcase, and an online document application can replace a laptop. These aren't radical expectations for functionality. Educate your users on how they should use these services, set a policy for putting company data on them and openly recommend & allow a documented collection of them.
- Go all in: Compare what you can do in house to what outsourcing some functionality could do. A corporate provided & administrated cloud application can give your users the functionality they need, the control that your IT must have and deliver services at a price point that you might not be able to meet internally.
A Happy Ending
It comes back to honesty. You have to be honest with yourself about what your users need and the best way to meet those needs. Come to terms with the fact that someone else might be able to deliver it better than you, and then continue to be involved the process to protect both your organization and the users.
Get ahead of the curve and spend some time trying to think and work like your users and be a more valuable member in your relationship…and bringing flowers every now and then wouldn’t hurt either.
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