In many large enterprises, the traces of shadow IT can be hard to track without having a dedicated software or tool in place to monitor all of the activity that happens from within an on-premise server or proxy address.
It has been reported that only around 8 per cent of cloud services publicly available today meet enterprise data security & privacy requirements, that leaves a huge chunk of services that may go unnoticed by IT departments if they don’t have the necessary security controls put into place.
Without a cloud access security broker, unauthorized use of public cloud services cannot be tracked. A good way to visualize it within your own business is to imagine if one of your employees claims to have found a better application for file-sharing than the one you currently provide to each of your staff. They most likely won’t raise this discovery with senior members in your organization, but there is a high chance they will share it with their co-workers.
When this adoption of a cloud service goes unnoticed, data can be shared via applications that don’t meet the minimum safety standards that would otherwise be controlled with a CASB in place. Data can be breached thanks to account hijacking, and unfortunately, your employees might not even know their account has been accessed, because their details aren’t stored anywhere but on their local, on-premise device.
As a result of this kind of breach occurring, your data security becomes compromised without your IT department having any real knowledge about the usage of that certain unsanctioned cloud service.