Transform Shadow IT into Innovation Using Caspio

A new survey by Stratecast found that more than 80% of employees admit to using SaaS applications not authorized for work purposes by their IT department. The number one reason? Employees just need to get their jobs done.

In the enterprise, IT departments commonly refer to any non-approved IT activity as “shadow IT”. According to the survey, shadow applications represent 35% of all the SaaS apps used in companies with over 1000 employees, which tend to have stricter IT policies than small companies.

Although shadow IT has been around in some form or another for many years, the survey points out that it is picking up velocity due to the accessibility and ease of cloud applications. Employees look to SaaS, PaaS, and cloud-based applications to maneuver around IT roadblocks. As you can see from the following chart, the top reasons cited by employees are they don’t have access to the right tools and internal IT processes are too long and restrictive.

Source: Stratecast and McAfee

So, how should organizations approach the shadow IT? According to Gartner, the solution doesn’t lie in eliminating it, but in finding ways for IT to better respond to employee needs. Here are a few of Gartner’s suggestions:

• Raise internal IT responsiveness and throughput in order to keep pace with business users’ requirements.
• If security requirements outweigh employee productivity, allow line-of-business managers to bring data into their shadow apps so they can utilize the information in a way they want to work.
• Provide support for shadow apps by looking at the customization, integration, and security options so that business users can generate their own custom reports and access real-time data.

As a leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider, Caspio offers an all-in-one solution for business users to create custom cloud applications to capture, publish and manage data without coding.

With over a decade of experience, Caspio serves both line-of-business users as well as IT professionals, offering services and tools to securely integrate or push and pull data with existing legacy systems. Two powerful capabilities in particular are:

• Caspio Web Services API – Enables third-party integration of your database applications with other software running on your website, corporate data center, or other cloud services. The API is SOAP-compatible and supports virtually all scripting and programming languages.
• Caspio DataHub – Allows you to automate authenticated data transfer tasks between your Caspio applications and other systems using FTP, SFTP, SCP, HTTP, HTTPS and Amazon S3 repositories.

Using Caspio, business users are empowered to innovate using custom applications tailored to how they want to work with their data, and IT departments can be comfortable that compatibility and security standards are maintained.

If you are interested bringing Caspio’s productivity platform into your organization, reach out to us for a project consultation or sign up for a free trial account to try the platform for yourself.