Reducing Shadow IT in Storage Purchases

One of the most significant changes for IT is that it’s no longer just a storage administrator’s job to keep storage environments up, running and backed up.

In fact, a business may have people inside and outside the traditional storage team making storage purchases and taking care of the day-to-day issues of storage environments, says Scott Sinclair, a senior analyst with the Enterprise Strategy Group.

“You might have an application development team purchasing storage directly” from a cloud service, he says. “If a business unit needs to share files, they may just create and expense a Dropbox account. This change creates a problem for the storage team because that data isn’t part of an overall company data strategy.”

Offering those rogue departments access to software-defined storage or hyperconverged infrastructure can help reduce such shadow IT, as well as ease backup and recovery if there’s a problem.

While it won’t stomp out every instance of unmanaged cloud use, it will help a lot in the long run, Sinclair says. “It’s a way to keep pace because if there’s not an IT-approved solution, users are going to find ways to go around them."

For more on how organizations are changing their storage strategies, check out our feature, "Real-World Benefits of Hyperconverged Infrastructure."