Solving the “Shadow IT” Database Problem

What is Shadow IT? The “Best of Both Worlds” Approach Governance by Design: The Guardrail Model Zero Trust and Infrastructure Integration The Strategic Pivot Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles Newly Updated Technical Guides: MS SQL Server and ADDS on VMware Cloud Foundation Advanced Cyber Compliance: Security, Compliance, and Resilience for VCF A Closer Look at VMware Cloud Foundation Advanced Services If you walk the halls of your development wing (or browse their Slack channels), you might find that your organization is running far more databases than you think. They aren’t in your CMDB, they aren’t being backed up by your central backup solution, and they weren’t provisioned by your team. They are running in the public cloud, paid for with a personal credit card or a discretionary project budget. This is the reality of “ Shadow IT. ” For years, we have treated this as a discipline problem—a failure of policy adherence. But if we are honest, it is actually a failure of service delivery. Developers don’t bypass IT because they are malicious; they do it because they are blocked. When the choice is between waiting two weeks for a ticket to be processed or swiping a card to get a database in two minutes, speed often wins. The cost of this convenience, however, is massive corporate risk. Every “shadow” database represents a compliance blind spot. Is that PostgreSQL instance encrypted? Is it patched against the latest CVE? Is sensitive customer data being stored in a region that violates data sovereignty laws? In a zero-trust world, you cannot secure what you cannot see. The solution is not to crack down harder with draconian policies, which only drives Shadow IT further underground.