Another day at the office. A busy marketing manager downloads a new app for team collaboration. Business plans are uploaded, marketing materials are shared. The team starts to communicate regularly about confidential business topics.

At the same time, the head of legal has an important document to review at home. She considers downloading it to a thumb drive but decides, instead, to send it to her personal email to read later that night.

These scenarios are familiar—and frightening—to anyone in corporate IT. With 80 percent of employees using non-approved SaaS apps, shadow IT has officially stepped out of the shadows and into the workplace.

File sharing and collaboration tools

The most frequently requested cloud services are file sharing and collaboration. When IT can’t provide easy, mobile solutions, business users turn to unauthorized apps, some of which put corporate information at risk. A recent study showed that of the 1,000+ cloud services used by enterprise employees, 44 are considered high risk to the business.*

Give business users what they want

There’s no reason to stay in the dark about shadow IT. This is the perfect opportunity to partner with the business to give them exactly what they want with a solution that’s secure, scalable and enterprise-ready. File sharing and collaboration tools in Office 365 are easy to use and provide mobile productivity for all business users.

Don’t wait to get ahead of shadow IT. Download this new infographic: 3 ways to outsmart shadow IT and learn how IT can help the business before business users help themselves.

*Cloud Security Alliance, Cisco and Frost & Sullivan