5 Critical Questions MSPs Should Be Asking Customers About Shadow IT

Changes in IT Procurement are creating opportunities for MSPs

LogicMonitor’s most recent research report shows that "customers top needs include 24/7 IT monitoring support (29%), support for remote work (24%), and decreased IT downtime (24%) —many of which could be automated, integrated, and further supported by their MSPs.”

A growing trend across organizations is that IT purchase decisions no longer reside with the IT department. Nowadays, internal teams have their own IT budgets and can purchase their own devices and software applications without having direct approval from internal IT departments. These independent purchases or “shadow IT ” create a challenge for companies because they do not always know what has been purchased and deployed. The de-centralization of IT procurement plus “moving to the cloud” is creating great opportunities for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to offer additional services to protect their clients and add visibility to their own IT landscape.

If your objective is to help your clients with this challenge, we recommend you start by asking your clients these 5 critical questions about their SaaS applications and shadow  IT.

1. How many SaaS applications is your company using? Most clients have some idea of how many SaaS applications are being used throughout their organization, but they don’t know the full scope.

   "IT departments estimate their companies use an average of 51 cloud services when the reality is they’re using an average of 730 cloud services."

   You can provide better service to them if you can identify what SaaS applications they are using across their departments. We also recommend using Augmentt Discover which helps discover SaaS applications with just a few clicks.
   
   
   
   

2. Do you know where your corporate data resides?

   Most clients understand that their data is everywhere and that it’s potentially a big problem. If your client doesn’t feel confident about where their data is, or what is coming in and going out then it’s a good time to recommend doing an audit to find all the points of entry/exit. CloudRadial can help you plot out your audit assessment in a client-friendly way so that your clients can keep tabs on their data.
   
   

3. Do you have an established disaster recovery plan?
   Many clients have ad-hoc disaster recovery plans in place and many do not properly document the process or the internal points of contact should something happen. Defining and documenting a plan is critical to being able to bring a client back online post-breach. Another danger of SaaS sprawl and its lack of visibility is that you can’t recover what you didn’t know existed. It’s critical to ensure SaaS is a key component of your disaster recovery plan.
   
   

4. Do you know how shadow IT can affect your compliance?

   Many clients need to adhere to industry-specific compliance rules and regulations. Shadow IT makes compliance harder by introducing additional security risks of data leakage to an organization. Along with tracking the SaaS apps your clients use, you should focus on the security risks of these applications to help create a priority of which apps need to be addressed first. CloudRadial can show your customers their SaaS app risk via Augmentt on the individual user level.
   
   

5. Do you have a plan to manage shadow IT?
   Clients need both visibility and a plan of action when it comes to their shadow IT. Reducing the risks will require constant collaboration between the MSP and the client. We recommend giving the client a central location to see and manage their SaaS, hardware, and more.

Conclusion
Augmentt Discover eliminates shadow IT by revealing the full list of SaaS applications in your client's environments. To make SaaS management even easier, CloudRadial provides a central location for your customers to access critical SaaS information. Managing shadow IT becomes easy and effective when you use these two platforms together.

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