Here's Why Your IT Department Hates Dropbox And Evernote
That makes you a big problem for your IT department. They need to make sure that private corporate data can't get hacked and that the company isn't breaking any regulations or laws by sharing information about its customers or storing it insecurely.
If employees are stashing work files in the cloud, the IT department is in the hot seat if that information gets hacked or leaked.
How likely is that? Pretty likely.
On Friday, Evernote was hacked, forcing the company to reset the passwords for more than 50 million accounts. Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft were also recently targeted by hackers.
And before that Zynga sued rival games maker, Kixeye, and an ex-employee, Alan Patmore, over charges that he copied proprietary work information to his Dropbox before leaving Zynga for Kixeye.
Those are just a couple of examples of how these tools are complicating business.
Even in high-tech companies, where the average employee understands the risks, these so-called "shadow IT" or "rogue apps are a problem.
Netflix found employees using 496 smartphone apps to share data, communicate, and collaborate. Cisco Systems found several hundred apps, including shopping and personal scheduling apps, touching its network via rogue employee apps, reports Quentin Hardy at New York Times.
So, your IT department might soon fight back by—for lack of a better term—spying on you.
Startup Skyhigh came out of stealth last week to help them do that, backed by $6.75 million from Greylock Partners, the venture-capital firm that backed Facebook and LinkedIn, among others.
Skyhigh scans more than 2,000 cloud services—basically, any software or app that runs over a website or otherwise connects to the Internet—and finds out if employees are using them.
It's an interesting approach to a problem that's sure to get worse. In a 2012 survey, PricewaterhouseCoopers, found that up to one-third of corporate IT spending was now for "shadow IT" apps bought directly by employees.
As employees bring their own smartphones, tablets, laptops, and apps to works, that number will climb. So will your IT department's efforts to control it.