Tag: shadow IT

What About Shadow IoT?

There has been so much talk about “Shadow IT” — employees using their own smartphones, tablets, cloud applications and mobile apps — and its impact on corporate IT that many don’t worry about it anymore. Many IT decision makers have simply acquiesced to the idea that employees will use their own devices, mobile apps and cloud applications, and so are finding ways to work within this new reality as opposed to fighting it. To be sure, Shadow IT has major implications for security, the ability to find and manage corporate data, the ability to satisfy compliance obligations and the like, but Shadow IT is here and it’s here to stay.

But what about “Shadow IoT”? There are a large number of personally owned IoT devices already accessing corporate networks, such as Apple Watches, Fitbits, Alexa/Google Home devices and the like. For example, an Apple Watch can be used to access corporate email and text messages, Fitbits send emails to wearers with their weekly status reports, and , to name just a few examples on the tip of this iceberg. Fueling this trend is growing corporate acceptance of the idea of integrating IoT with business processes — companies like Salesforce, Capital One, AETNA, SAP and SITA, among others, are embracing use of the Apple Watch and developing applications for it. Moreover, the use of wearable IoT devices can increase employee productivity — a Rackspace study found that productivity and job satisfaction both benefited from their use.

While personally managed IoT devices represent an enormous boon to their owners, they also can create a number of security risks. For example, researchers at the University of Edinburgh were able to circumvent the encryption that Fitbit uses to send data, leaving users vulnerable to theft of their personal information. In 2015, a Fortinet researcher discussed a proof-of-concept that could infect a Fitbit device with malicious code that could then send malware to a PC connected to the device (a claim that Fitbit denied). Researchers at Binghamton University found that sensors in wearable devices could be used to determine passwords and PINs with up to 90 percent accuracy. Apple Watches have been banned from cabinet meetings of UK government ministers over fears that the devices could be hacked and used to listen in on these meetings.

Does your organization have a policy to protect against Shadow IoT? What security measures have you implemented specifically to address this threat? I’d like to get your feedback on what your organization is doing for a future blog post.

BYOD OK?

We have recently completed a survey of IT decision makers that are knowledgeable about security issues in their organizations, and we found something surprising: the concern about “shadow IT” — employee use of unauthorized cloud apps or services — is significantly lower in this year’s survey than it was just over a year ago. While there can be variability between surveys because of sampling and other issues, the difference we found is not explained by sampling variability, but instead represents a significant shift of concern away from the problem of shadow IT and BYOD/C/A (Bring Your Own Devices/Cloud/Applications).

Why?

Three theories:

  • First, we have not seen big, headline-grabbing data breaches result from the use of personally owned smartphones, tablets, laptops and other employee-owned and managed devices, cloud applications and mobile applications. While these breaches occur and clearly are a problem, the horror stories that were anticipated from the use of these devices have been few and far between.
  • Second, senior management — both in IT and in lines of business — have seemingly acquiesced to the notion of employees using their own devices. They realize that stopping employees from using their own devices to access work-related resources is a bit like controlling ocean surf with a broom.
  • Third, there are some advantages that businesses can realize from employees using their own devices. While lower business costs are an important advantage because IT doesn’t have to purchase devices for some employees, another important benefit is that IT doesn’t have to manage them either. For example, when an employee leaves a company and company-supplied devices need to be deactivated, some organizations aren’t exactly sure who’s responsible for doing so — IT, the employee’s manager, HR or someone else. A survey we conducted some time back asked, “when an employee who had a company-supplied mobile phone leaves your employment, how confident are you that you are not still paying for their mobile service?” We found that only 43 percent of respondents were “completely confident” that the mobile service was deactivated, and 11 percent either were “not really sure” or just didn’t know. Employees using their own devices and plans gets around this problem nicely.

To be sure, unfettered and unmanaged use of employee devices in the workplace is not a good idea. It can lead to a number of problems, such as the inability for IT to know where all of a company’s data is stored, the inability to properly archive that data, the inability to produce all of it during an eDiscovery effort or a regulatory audit, lots of duplicate data, a failure to establish an authoritative record for corporate data, a greater likelihood of data breaches if a device is lost, and the potential for not being able to satisfy regulatory obligations.

That last point is particularly important, especially in the context of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A key element of the GDPR is a data subject’s “right to be forgotten”, which translates to a data holder’s obligation to find and expunge all data it has on a data subject. If an organization cannot first determine all of the data it holds on a data subject and then cannot find all of that data, it runs the risk of violating the GDPR and can pay an enormous penalty as a result.

In short, BYOD/C/A offers a number of important advantages, but it carries with it some serious risks and should be addressed as a high priority issue in any organization.