What is Shadow IT and how does it affect your digital supply chain?

When news hit of supply chain attacks at SolarWinds, Kaseya, Okta, and others, many businesses were shocked first, and terrified second. Why? Many organizations had to quickly scramble to understand if their systems were connected to these major companies.

No organization is an island, and security and risk management leaders need to know if their organizations use affected products like those mentioned above, or if any other services they employ may have been recently breached, and to what extent. 

This can be an easy task when the vendor inventory is up to date, showing all third party connections across the enterprise network. But what happens when security is not aware of the presence of a third party vendor in the network?

This is where Shadow IT comes into play, and where the latest integration between ThirdPartyTrust and Netskope becomes essential.

What is Shadow IT?

Shadow IT is the use of hardware, software, or cloud services by a corporate user or department without the knowledge of the IT security team within the organization. With the shift to the Cloud and the rapid adoption of cloud-based services, the growth of Shadow IT has accelerated, often introducing security and compliance concerns.

As a consequence, a shadow supply chain arises – a complex web of unknown cloud applications, user accounts, data, and permissions scattered across the internet. With so many tools available online that are easy to sign up for and install, users have developed a habit of adopting cloud apps and services to assist them in their work. But this often means engaging with a third party vendor without involving security teams at all or until the very end of the process.

Shadow supply chains present a challenge for security and risk management leaders, and an ideal scenario for attackers to exploit. When high-profile data breaches make headlines, how do you know whether or not your organization is affected?

Solving the Shadow IT supply chain issue

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains, a three-fold increase from 2021. As it often happens in cybersecurity, it’s not a matter of if, but when.

The most effective way to be prepared for these attacks is to develop a deep understanding of your extended network, shedding light into shadow supply chains to reduce the risk of supply chain attacks.

So how do you discover the unknown? The solution is twofold:

• Process-wise, you need to devise a secure methodology for employees to share sensitive assets across the internet, and connect all kinds of third party services.
• Technology-wise, you need a tool to automatically and effortlessly detect software that your company’s employees use, and take necessary action. 

As employees introduce new IT services to the network, share sensitive assets over the internet, and connect with third party services, they must be empowered to do so in highly secure and visible ways. It’s no longer feasible to block every application or service that an employee wants to use to get their work done, as this approach is manual, unscalable, and may be bypassed by savvy users. 

Instead, security and risk management leaders need to make it easier for employees to introduce new vendors and technologies in accordance with security and governance policies, while also facilitating their own monitoring and management of these vendors.

The ability to discover unknown vendors and unlock extra intelligence on already monitored vendors in your network is something you can easily achieve with the ThirdPartyTrust third party risk management tool, by means of our integration with Netskope. 

The ThirdPartyTrust and Netskope integration provides customers with unrivaled visibility and real-time data on usage of cloud services, websites, and private apps from anywhere, on any device across the network.

An intelligence-driven data flow creates direct connections with the Cloud applications being used by each employee, whether they were reported to the security team or not. This helps organizations solve the industry problem of Shadow IT.

By seamlessly moving data, ThirdPartyTrust and Netskope simplify and automate the task of discovering unknown vendors, adding them to the monitored inventory, and transmitting information in the manner that meets the needs and requirements of each business area. This creates a bridge between traditionally siloed teams, such as GRC, security, and risk managers.

Learn more about the ThirdPartyTrust and Netskope integration

This type of functionality is becoming a business differentiator for several reasons. First, because it helps organizations prevent and reduce third party risk. Second, because it serves audit purposes. Third, because it facilitates remediation. 

When security leaders find out about a new zero day vulnerability being exploited, or a high-profile data breach, they can quickly determine the impact of the incident and whether or not the affected service was an approved supplier to the organization. Having visibility into your shadow supply chain is the only way to stay ahead of complex, modern supply chain attacks.

This integration is immediately available to ThirdPartyTrust customers already using the TPRM tool. Aspiring customers, and/or current Netskope customers, can contact ThirdPartyTrust associates to see the integration in action, and begin to learn how it can help their organization.

Are you ready to solve the shadow IT issue in your organization? Contact us to learn more about how ThirdPartyTrust can help.