Extract from Sam Bock’s article “What Legal Leaders Should Know About Shadow AI”
What’s dwelling in the dark corners of your tech stack? Because, as CIOs and other business leaders have long learned, what you don’t know can hurt you. For them, shadow IT is nothing new. It’s no less frustrating with time, though.
In fact, it’s been a persistent thorn in legal leaders’ sides for more than a decade—since at least the early 2010s, when employees’ unsanctioned use of cloud storage tools like Dropbox sent files outside approved systems and began complicating data security, privacy, and discovery questions.
Over time, shadow IT slithered well beyond file storage. Today, messaging platforms, productivity apps, collaboration tools, and the complexities of using personal devices for work all proliferate at enterprises of pretty much every industry and scale.
