In 2025, the proliferation of shadow IT—technology systems and solutions adopted without explicit organizational approval—has escalated to the point that it’s nearly impossible to separate home devices from enterprise infrastructure without serious investment in security and device management. This surge is primarily driven by employees seeking efficient tools to enhance productivity, often bypassing IT departments.
Companies can only monitor some of the pieces of software that their employees use. It’s inevitable, then, that those employees will start to kludge together their solutions through personal software or freeware from the Internet.
This is such a problem that Splunk recently rated shadow IT as one of the top 50 threats to cybersecurity today.
This is, of course, a massive concern for security and compliance teams. Here, we’ll discuss shadow IT and its risks to your organization.