Employees across every department are experimenting with generative AI tools to write emails, analyze data, summarize documents, and debug code. According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, one in five organizations experienced a breach tied to shadow AI, and 63% of breached organizations either lacked an AI governance policy or were still building one. Meanwhile, research shows that roughly 80% of office workers now use some form of public AI, often without their IT department’s knowledge or approval. 

This gap between adoption and governance is creating an unmanaged attack surface that traditional security tools may overlook.

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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.

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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.

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