Shadow I.T. SaaS, Silos and dbFront
Shadow I.T. or Dark I.T. refers to technology and projects that are brought into a company without the approval of the I.T. department.
The motive behind Shadow I.T. is usually good. Shadow I.T. represents employees struggling with productivity, budgets, and timelines and coming up with their own creative solutions. The side effect is that these well-intentioned projects can have significant costs and risks.
The Cloud is a Silo, at another Vendor
The biggest source of costs and risks come from the age-old I.T. problem of Silos, and worse, external Silos.
Silos are where different parts of an organization create information stores and processes that are incompatible with other systems. Silos create the costly challenge of sharing and synchronizing data because it is crucial that everyone works with a single version of the truth. For more details see: Information Silo
Cloud and SaaS-based projects create Silos that are now located offsite at another vendor. The Cloud makes Silos even more complex and risky because now the systems are not even managed and owned by a single group. After all, "The Cloud" is just a fancy name for "Someone else's computer".
The result is that someone now has the added responsibility of:
- Managing security integration - What if an employee leaves?
- Managing the data integration - Ensuring that shared data remains in sync,
- Ensuring compliance - SOX, FISMA, HIPAA, PCI DSS...,
- Dealing with backups and redundancy - How much do you trust the vendor?
How dbFront can help
dbFront avoids the Silo problem entirely by allowing you to extend the use of your existing data on your existing servers.
By enabling the quick and easy creation of internal web applications using your existing infrastructure and data, dbFront gives I.T. departments one more tool to get at the root of the Shadow I.T. problem.
dbFront:
- installs locally and integrates with your existing network security. This avoids security integration issues.
- connects to your existing data in your existing database. This eliminates data duplication and synchronization issues.
- as a result, backup and compliance issues are avoided or greatly simplified.
For more details on how dbFront works see: Details