Six per cent of all IT procurement is shadow IT

Computing research finds a lack of strategy around IT buying decisions, with under 40 per cent of purchases following an organisational strategy, and most being individually sanctioned

Six per cent of all IT procurement in the UK is made on a completely ad hoc basis, in a trend known as ‘shadow IT', where business owners and technology departments are unaware of the tools, systems and services being bought.

That's according to research from Computing, discussed during a recent web seminar for Nutanix 'Cloud mix and match, getting the balance right'.

When asked ‘who decides where an application will be deployed (e.g. in public cloud, private cloud, on premises, collocation, MSP etc), respondents said that for financial systems, 51 per cent of decisions were made by IT, 47 per cent by the line of business department, with 2 per cent stating that it was all down to one individual to decide.

The proportion of decisions made by IT was far higher for test and development virtual machines (85 per cent), office suites (91 per cent) and backup and recovery (96 per cent). The largest proportion of decisions made by individuals was for online storage services such as Dropbox, at eight per cent. These services are often where the bulk of unsanctioned shadow IT decisions happen.

When the web seminar's live audience was polled for its experiences, 59 per cent said purchasing decisions are made on a case by case basis, with 39 per cent following organisational strategy, and six per cent being ad hoc, or shadow IT.

Commenting on the fact that the majority of decisions are made without a clear, defining strategy, Jon Forster, global programme director at Fitness First said "I'm not surprised, but it's not the right way to go."

Ray Bricknell, managing director of consultancy Behind Every Cloud said that making case by case decisions risks using multiple clouds inefficiently, agreeing with Forster that more effort should be made to follow an overarching strategy.

"Do you want a smattering of applications on AWS and a smattering on Azure? Probably not, so you need to look at which cloud is right for you. That decision shouldn't be left to the line of business owner."

Bricknell also discussed the proportion of respondents making decisions by shadow IT, calling it "the most dangerous element."

However he was less perturbed by the research findings for CRM platform purchases, which reveals that 55 per cent of decisions were made by IT, 43 per cent by line of business, and two per cent by individuals.

"Salesforce dominates CRM, so I'm not surprised there's a high level of departmental demand driving that decision. It's not hard to decide between CRM platforms, and there are some religious points of view around what products people like to use, so that may be skewing the data," he added.

The panel also warned that vendor diversity should be key element of any cloud strategy.