Imagine, if you will, a world where anyone in your company could easily bypass the law department to get legal work done. Employees could simply go online, ask whatever question or initiate whatever project they have and get what they need. For free. How good is the work product or the advice? Nobody knows. Who is behind this service? It’s not easy to find on their website, but there is a Wikipedia page that lists the names of founders. How good is the work product? No way to know, but your employees like it a lot. Do you know who in your company is using this service, how often and what for? Probably not. What risks does this pose? You have no idea.

Believe it or not, your IT department deals with this nightmare scenario all the time. “App culture” has reached the corporation. Every day, millions of workers are using cloud-based tools like Slack, HipChat, Dropbox, Google Drive and Evernote that circumvent the corporate information ecosystem. “Workers are downloading them themselves and using tools that IT does not support, understand or is even aware of,” says Tim Anderson, managing director at FTI Technology. How pervasive is this problem? Slack itself has 3 million daily average users, who spend an average of 320 minutes there on a typical weekday, sending and receiving what could be more than a billion messages per month.

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