Migrating to the cloud offers federal agencies huge advantages in performance and flexibility. Government services can’t effectively scale or adopt new capabilities like big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning and internet of things without migrating to the cloud. But government cloud adoption has empowered an old IT nemesis: shadow IT.
Shadow IT is the use of IT systems, devices, software, apps and services outside the supervision of an organization’s approved IT systems. In the past, shadow IT was typically a business unit creating their own locally developed applications, or LDAs, because the office of the chief information officer engagement was judged too onerous. During my time in public service, I saw personnel surreptitiously use Microsoft Access to address an urgent data processing need that inadvertently turned into a mission-critical mission system. This was only discovered when Microsoft Access reached its scaling limits and then turned into an emergency project to transform it into a web-based application.
What Agencies Need to Do to Combat Shadow IT Driven by Cloud Sprawl – Nextgov
