The IT landscape is defined by macro and micro challenges, and will continue to be in the future - influencing IT’s ability to be innovative and drive business value. To overcome them, cloud services have the potential to be that ‘great enabler’, driving great flexibility and scalability across operations.
However, organizations' hybrid multi-cloud landscapes currently exist in an unwieldy tangle that is expensive and time-consuming to maintain. This has led to a cloud conundrum that is exacerbating some of IT’s biggest problems, such as the skills gap and cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
Additionally, there is an assumption that clouds are largely the same, when in fact, cloud platforms are all subtly different and require the right set of skills across each multi-cloud environment. As a result, customers are getting caught out when deploying and optimizing their cloud services, with challenges arising around the portability of workloads and the skills required to adopt and maintain multi-cloud.
Before exploring some of the IT practices that could help overcome this cloud conundrum, let’s first dive into the cloud challenges that the IT industry is facing in more depth.
Principal Specialist Solution Architect at Red Hat.
Today’s cloud challenges
Cloud adoption was once heralded as a budget-friendly solution. However if adopted and managed incorrectly, it can morph into a costly solution for many organizations. We’re unfortunately seeing pricing structures that lack clarity and intricate cloud management challenges, which have each resulted in costs spiraling unexpectedly.
Furthermore, with developers under pressure to adopt a product mindset, there is an increasing frustration with any barriers surrounding their cloud workspace, as these barriers hinder their ability to develop easily. Widespread concerns over inadequate development tools and processes are also amplifying budget pressures across departments, turning the promise of the cloud into a perplexing financial puzzle.
The solution lies in legitimizing Shadow IT
Shadow IT has the potential to help to solve these cloud problems. First, let’s explore the concept itself, as the reputation of Shadow IT isn’t all positive.
To summarize, Shadow IT involves staff going outside of company sanctioned IT services to solve problems and adopting whatever tech, software or cloud platform they need to do their job well. It’s not a new principle and according to analysts, reports and veteran CIOs, most organizations have elements of Shadow IT running within their environment.
However, opinions regarding Shadow IT vary. Commonly, Shadow IT is thought of as a disparate, ungoverned and confusing mix of tech with inherent gaps and duplication. But far from being a threat, Shadow IT instead represents an opportunity.
Rethinking Shadow IT
By bringing legitimacy to Shadow IT, organizations can simplify application delivery and enable developers to focus on what matters most: delivering important applications that deliver business value, quickly. In turn, they can seamlessly identify and enable services and platforms that deliver value, around which organizations can coalesce to create acceptable standardized solutions.
Ultimately, when employees adopt an unauthorized application in the form of Shadow IT, they’re likely doing so because it brings valuable benefits - from speeding up DevOps to unlocking innovation with new features. These benefits will differentiate competitors, and if organizations want to reap their rewards, they should look to remove the friction surrounding their access.
Instead of turning away from the use of Shadow IT, organizations should make use of the applications and create a path that allows reviewed technology to be used in the route-to-production. Leveraging cloud platforms can securely support this type of innovation, development and experimentation. We need to shift the needle and rethink Shadow IT, shining a more positive light on how its legitimation can drive business innovation and cloud development.
With this legitimation comes the introduction of more applications to a company’s existing roster. To smoothly integrate these and ensure an organization optimizes the tools, they should take a platform approach that abstracts as much as possible from the user. Platform-as-a-product emerged as a way for organizations to wrap their arms around this new generation of IT stacks in order to make the process easier for users. With platform management and a technology abstraction layer that sits on top of the platform, organizations can better manage the technology stack that is required for developers and admin and operations teams to complete their tasks.
Using Shadow IT to solve customer challenges
Endorsing Shadow IT enables experimentation, flexibility, and scale, giving developers a dynamic space where they can embrace open source and foster a product mindset. Having a product mindset will help understand the requirements of those turning to Shadow IT, and provide platforms that cater to these changing needs. This also nurtures a collaborative and robust security environment within organizations. Further benefits of legitimizing Shadow IT include:
- Ensuring a secure hybrid multi-cloud ecosystem, as it’s better to legitimize the desire to use new applications than have them running in the shadows where the risks will only increase.
- Allowing cloud independence, because not being tied to one cloud platform or technology means businesses can grow and expand without limits. Users have access to what they need to succeed and the organization can focus on achieving loftier innovation goals, including, for example, the use of AI and edge computing.
- Bringing value to customers, as this innovation that enables organizations to adopt new tech also means they can deliver ever increasing value. In turn, this opens up new routes to market, partnerships, customer retention, loyalty, NPS improvements and greater market share.
- Enabling cloud innovation across teams by making the mix of cloud services widely available and easy to use. This will reduce the extraneous load so that wider teams can accelerate in their usage and adoption of cloud technologies to deliver outstanding IT applications for their users.
There’s no doubt that innovation will remain at the top of agendas for a long time. To help propel innovation forward, organizations should view Shadow IT as a glimpse into the future of IT rather than a hindrance.
Forward-thinking companies should embrace change and leverage cloud platforms to safely nurture their Shadow IT pioneers. Encouraging experimentation can in turn help to foster a culture of creativity and drive transformative change.
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