‘You Can’t Manage What You Can’t See’: Cisco Helps Businesses Address Shadow IT

Shadow IT is rampant. For years, CIOs have known that business groups were circumventing the IT department to access public cloud services they felt they needed to do their jobs. Only recently have CIOs begun to realize the full extent of the cloud sprawl across their organizations and the pitfalls for their business. To help CIOs manage their shadow IT issues, Cisco is launching Cloud Consumption as a Service—a new software-as-a-service product that discovers and monitors public cloud services an organization is using.  

Recent analysis by Cisco reveals the extent of the shadow IT challenge. The average large enterprise now uses 1,220 individual public cloud services. That’s up to 25 times more than estimated by IT. And the average number of public cloud services has grown 112 percent over the past year, and 67 percent over the past six months. Even worse, there are significant business risks associated with uncontrolled adoption of public cloud services. These range from regulatory compliance and data protection, to business continuity, cost and service performance. 

That’s where Cisco® Cloud Consumption as a Service comes into play. The primary function of the new service is to discover and continually monitor public cloud use across an organization. When combined with detailed analytics and benchmarking from Cisco, this insight helps businesses reduce security risks and better understand and manage costs. This helps IT team to partner more effectively with business groups and make educated decision about the right cloud services for the business.