What it is
Shadow IT covers every asset employees spin up outside sanctioned processes: cloud storage buckets, SaaS trial tenants, rogue repositories, unsanctioned messaging tools, forgotten subdomains, or personal automation scripts that end up exposed on the internet. These assets rarely inherit centralized logging, monitoring, or hardening, and ownership is often murky. As companies adopt self-service cloud development and no-code tooling, the volume of orphaned infrastructure grows faster than security teams can catalog it.
Why it matters
Untracked assets expand the external attack surface and frequently become the weakest link in the environment. Misconfigured shadow workloads undermine compliance attestations, enable domain spoofing, and leak sensitive data without any detection controls in place. During incident response, responders waste precious time discovering who owns a rogue service or whether it contains regulated information, delaying containment and disclosure requirements.
How to reduce risk
- Continuously inventory external-facing assets with attack surface management and DNS monitoring to detect surprises early.
- Require approval workflows or lightweight registration before teams adopt new SaaS, domains, or infrastructure.
- Monitor for unauthorized cloud deployments, abandoned Git repositories, and stale subdomains, and tie each asset to an accountable owner.
- Provide secure, well-supported alternatives (e.g., sanctioned collaboration suites or managed storage) to reduce the temptation to bypass IT.