Today, moving to the cloud is the cornerstone of a digital transformation strategy. The cloud can enable greater innovation, customer engagement, productivity, and business model transformation. Every organization, strategically, is in different stages on their journey to the cloud.

However, most employees have already taken enterprises into the cloud—whether their organization is ready or not—by using software as a service (SaaS) applications and cloud services at work. This is widespread across enterprises.

This trend, called shadow IT, creates challenges for organizations in IT and application management, security, and compliance. Not knowing what applications your employees are using and where sensitive data might be going introduces tremendous risk into your organization. Traditional network security solutions are simply not designed to protect data in SaaS apps and cannot give IT visibility into how employees are using the cloud.

The extent of shadow IT use is not well known by many enterprises. Some studies show that only 8 percent of companies know the scope of shadow IT at their organizations. Do you know the scope in your organization?

Your company might be tackling this issue head-on, or is just starting to figure out the extent of shadow IT use (or is hesitant to even find out!). No matter where you are on the journey, you know that understanding the extent of shadow IT and managing it, is absolutely critical to the security of your organization.

Regardless of where you are with shadow IT in your organization, read on to learn about steps you should be taking today to help your company manage shadow IT, and its inherent security risks, while empowering employees to work in the ways they want.