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Enterprise Cloud For Dummies, Nutanix Special Edition
As with so many things, you must adapt or you will be relegated to the dustbin of irrelevancy. Look at how many mainframe operators who failed to stay current didn’ t survive the wave of decentralization that defined IT in the 1980s and 1990s.
History teaches that change is inevitable. It’ s time for you to adjust your perspective on a number of fronts— beginning right now— so that you stay relevant into the 2020s and beyond.
Why shadow IT should be embraced, but managed
“ If IT isn’ t providing it, no one should be doing it.”
Variations of this phrase have been around for a long time. My, how times have changed.
Today’ s business units can stand up services with nothing more than a credit card and, frankly, many do so. Services have become vastly more consumable than they were just a few years ago. You can thank the cloud for much of this. Thousands upon thousands of software services are available for your users to quickly and easily stand up and consume.
Further, end‐users have become far more tech‐savvy than they used to be. Luddites no more, many end‐users rival and exceed IT staff technical knowledge in many ways and they are the subject matter experts in their areas.
Users don’ t want to be fully reliant on IT anymore, either. They want to do their jobs on their own terms.
This phenomenon has become known as shadow IT because it often happens in the dark corners of the company. End‐user departments build systems that they need because IT either can’ t or won’ t build them. Or, users perceive IT as being so slow that it makes no sense to engage IT in the first place.
CIOs and other IT leaders see shadow IT as a threat to be abolished, and sometimes they have good reasons:
✓ Security: Although end‐users have become far more savvy about technology, they are often far less knowledgeable than IT about security. Further, IT is charged
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