Shadow IT: The Digital Squatters in Your Business
This week’s episode is going to make you very uncomfortable, and frankly, that's exactly what you need.
Forty-two percent of business applications are unauthorized. Not a typo. Nearly half of all software running in UK businesses is completely unknown to IT departments.
In today's episode, Mauven and I dive deep into the Shadow IT underworld living in your business right now. We're talking about the digital squatters who've moved in rent-free while you weren't looking.
What You'll Discover in Episode 6
The Shocking Statistics: How Productiv's research revealed the true scope of unauthorized applications, and why this number is probably conservative.
Real Horror Stories: Including the business with seventeen project management tools for twelve people, and Karen from accounting whose personal Dropbox became the official backup strategy (with password "Password" shared via email).
The Communication Chaos: How WhatsApp Business became a customer service platform storing financial data and accidentally sharing confidential information with the wrong groups.
AI Wild West: Businesses feeding confidential data to ChatGPT and Claude because "it's just for research."
Detection Methods That Work: The DNS monitoring breakthrough that revealed one client connecting to over 200 cloud domains in a single week.
Why This Episode Matters Right Now
While you're implementing firewalls and endpoint protection, your helpful employees are cheerfully bypassing every security control by uploading sensitive data to cloud services you've never heard of.
Mauven brings her NCSC perspective on how government departments handle Shadow IT, while I share war stories from the trenches of SMB cybersecurity disasters.
We'll give you the three-phase approach to actually finding and managing these digital squatters before they invite their criminal friends to the party.
Listen Now
This isn't theoretical cybersecurity theatre. This is happening in your business right now. The only question is whether you'll discover it during a planned audit or during a GDPR investigation.
Coming This Week: We'll dive deeper into specific Shadow IT detection methods, analyse how this complicates Patch Tuesday, and share a case study of the agency that discovered forty-three unauthorized applications.
Your homework: Check your DNS logs this week. Prepare for emotional trauma when you see how many unauthorized cloud services your business is using.