Shadow IT is the collection of systems and applications that exist within the company’s IT landscape but haven’t been officially authorized for certain purposes.

Is performing inspections using MS Excel, MS Word, or Google Sheets part of the shadow IT landscape?

Unfortunately, it is, and despite these technologies being used outside the company, they are often used for business purposes because of a lack of alternatives. If you run inspections using one of these programs, you know how difficult it is to exchange data between separate software programs.

You may have also noticed how complicated collaboration turns out to be. Using multiple systems to perform a single inspection is time-consuming and inefficient, it can also have other major consequences that you are not completely aware of.

In this whitepaper, we are going to clear the air by explaining how inspection engineers use these technologies, how they might impact the businesses’ growth and security in the long run, what risks arise across the organization, and what the alternative is.

Research from Spiceworks proves that 40% of end-users are still going behind the IT department’s back to set up unapproved services, causing data breaches, stealth, malicious activity, and data loss. There are situations when the IT departments unintentionally limit the business performance when building specific technology domains, with little or no consideration of whether other technologies might be more suitable and leaving little room for autonomy.