3 Tips for Reducing Infrastructure Sprawl and Shadow IT in 2020
Businesses today need to move fast to deliver innovation, meet end-user needs, and grow the business. To keep up with the fast-paced business operations, sales, development, and testing teams need quick access to environments—and IT departments are under tremendous pressure to provide environments to these teams. However, when IT can’t fulfill the numerous complicated requests, other departments turn to shadow IT practices that can lead to infrastructure sprawl, security vulnerabilities, and more.
This post reveals three tips for reducing shadow IT and infrastructure sprawl in 2020.
How to Reduce Infrastructure Sprawl and Shadow IT
1. Change Perception of IT
In many organizations, the IT department often gets incorrectly labeled as a bottleneck, inhibitor of innovation, or police of policies. And the strict enforcement of the company’s policies and device utilization often leads to shadow IT processes. However, the IT department’s role is essential for reducing the chances of security risks and data breaches and managing equipment and resources effectively.
According to a recent article, 77% of the survey respondents agree that by 2025, shadow IT will be a bigger issue if left unchecked. By changing your employee’s perception of the IT department and educating teams on the consequences of shadow IT may not only help reduce shadow IT practices and infrastructure sprawl, but it may also boost the morale of your IT department.
2. Eliminate Time-consuming Approval Processes
Whether you’re in sales, development, or testing, the process for getting an environment provisioned can take weeks—and sometimes even months—delaying sales and innovation cycles. Complicated approval processes can bury your IT team under a mound of tickets, causing even further delays.
Eliminate time-consuming approval processes by leveraging an Environment as a Service solution to create automated environment blueprints, which are templates that define all the components needed to get the job done. These automated templates can be accessed on-demand by the end-users, without the need for lengthy approval processes.
Removing approval processes not only reduces bottlenecks, but it increases productivity and enables your IT department to focus more on complex problem solving than repetitive tasks.
3. Automate Tear-down Cycles
Infrastructure sprawl is often a result of environments running while not in use. Because it may take weeks or months for an environment to be provisioned, many people tend to hold onto the environment and keep it running idly, so it’s available when they need to access it again. Unfortunately, this has the potential to drive up costs exponentially for the unused resources.
Once the environment is up and running, you need to have a plan in place for tearing down the environment to manage cost and improve utilization. Automating the tear-down process helps maximize resource efficiency, eliminate unnecessary spending, and improve productivity by making resources available for other teams to use.
Learn how companies are using CloudShell Pro to reduce infrastructure sprawl and shadow IT by providing end-users with on-demand access to automatically spin-up and tear-down environments.
