Bringing Cloud Computing Out of the Shadows: Shine the light on Shadow IT with active policy enforcement and cloud automation

Bringing Cloud Computing
Out of the Shadows
Shine the light on Shadow IT with active policy enforcement and cloud automation
Terms and Conditions Copyright © 2016 DivvyCloud.
All Rights Reserved
DivvyCloud

Executive Summary
Cloud computing has proven revolutionary for organizations
hoping to leverage technology, innovation and digital
strategies to stay ahead of the competition. Business
units can quickly provision up compute, storage and
network resources as they need without IT bottlenecks.
But easy access to cloud resources has a dark side—one
that’s become a growing problem: Shadow IT. Engineers,
developers and even business stakeholders are launching
resources that IT is unaware of. And what IT doesn’t know
can come back to haunt organizations, preventing the IT
department from performing critical functions such as
controlling security, compliance and costs.
Fortunately, solutions are available to mitigate the risks
posed by Shadow IT, especially at production scale. The
cloud automation platform developed by DivvyCloud
provides comprehensive, real-time visibility of virtual
resources and allows enterpriseS to set and automatically
enforce policies regarding cloud provisioning and ongoing
operations.
This white paper details the challenges Shadow IT poses
for organizations and how DivvyCloud enables those
organizations to effectively mitigate security, compliance
and cost risks.
DivvyCloud
EDITOR
Peter Scott
WRITER
Cheryl Goldberg
CONTACT
1400 Key Blvd,
Level A, Suite #6
Arlington, VA,
22209, USA,
+1 (571) 290-5077
info@divvycloud.com
Terms and Conditions Copyright © 2016 DivvyCloud.
All Rights Reserved
DISCLAIMER: This white paper is for informational
purposes only and is provided“as is”with no war-
ranties whatsoever including any warranty of
merchantability, fitness for any particular purpose, or
any warranty otherwise arising out of any proposal,
specification, or sample. No license, express or
implied, to any intellectual property rights is granted
or intended hereby.
Product or company names mentioned herein may
be the trademarks of their respective owners.
2 Shine the light on Shadow IT with active policy enforcement and cloud automation
BRINGING CLOUD COMPUTING OUT OF THE SHADOWS

IN JULY OF 2015, THE ARMY NATIONAL GUARD EXPERIENCED A TREMENDOUS DATA
BREACH. SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS, HOME ADDRESSES, AND OTHER PERSONAL
INFORMATION FOR APPROXIMATELY 850,000 CURRENT AND FORMER NATIONAL GUARD
MEMBERS WERE EXPOSED. BUT THE CAUSE WASN’T WHAT ONE MIGHT THINK. IT WASN'T
AN ATTACK FROM MALICIOUS HACKERS; THE BREACH RESULTED FROM AN IMPROPERLY
HANDLED DATA TRANSFER TO A NON-ACCREDITED DATA CENTER AS PART OF A BUDGET
ANALYSIS CONDUCTED BY A CONTRACT EMPLOYEE.
In other words, the Army National Guard’s data breach was one example of what can
happen as a result of “Shadow IT” -- the acquisition of technology by a department
or team without the approval guidance or support of IT.
In the typical scenario, Shadow IT comes about when a business unit or department
becomes frustrated with IT’s inability to deliver what they need when they need it.
With business units under increasing pressure to launch new initiatives under tight
deadlines in order to win, serve and retain customers, they go off and spin up cloud-
based resources on their own, often without informing IT.
Cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google and Microsoft
facilitate this behavior by making it simple to access IT infrastructure ondemand.
No longer must end users go to IT, contend with red tape and wait while IT orders
a new server, physically installs it, connects it to a router and so on. Instead, users
simply employ a software-defined infrastructure, click a button, and voila, they now
have new compute resources. These resources are paid for using corporate credit
cards or, more often, by accessing an existing AWS or other corporate cloud accounts
associated with a master contract and charging back costs.
ENTERPRISE IT IS LEFT HOLDING THE BAG
While cloud consumers are pleased with the rapid access to services, IT departments
remain responsible for knowing where data is located and ensuring that it remains
The Growing Problem of Shadow IT
3

protected. Yet this type of Shadow IT in the cloud
makes it very difficult for on IT department to fulfill
its responsibilities because it is often unaware of the
resources others in the organization have procured.
These resources after often complex to sort out.
Companies often find themselves with multiple
accounts from numerous cloud service providers
(CSPs) for multiple business units. Large numbers of
resources can be acquired and distributed across cloud
accounts and environments; it’s not uncommon to see
hundreds of instances or thousands of snapshots, along
with associated storage volumes, networks, subnets
and security groups. Organizations may even find
themselves with growing numbers of services from a
given vendor. For example AWS continues to introduce
new services such as their Relational Database Service
(RDS), ElastiCache, and Elastic Container Service (ECS).
Business and technical users that procure new
services and haven’t had prior experience managing
infrastructure, may not understand what they should
and shouldn’t do in terms of configuration. They often
understand how to properly configure security settings
or how much capacity/memory to allocate. They may
be ignorant of corporate IT rules, choose to ignore the
rules or might just not think about them.
To make matters worse, even if IT were to have a handle
on all these resources, the environment continually
changes over its lifecycle. Users or the cloud platform
itself may open a security rule, back up data to an
unapproved region or add excessive compute power,
racking up the monthly bill.
• A recent survey of 200 global
CIOs by Brocade found that
83 percent of enterprises
experienced unauthorized
provisioning of cloud services.
Nearly 72 percent of executives
don’t know how many Shadow
IT applications are being used
in their organization.1
• By 2018, Shadow IT will
contribute up to 30% of IT
activities, up from 15 percent
in 20142, according to Gartner.
• A Cisco report found that the
number of unauthorized cloud
apps used by enterprises was
approximately times higher
than CIOs predicted. While
CIOs reported an average of 51
cloud services running in their
organizations, Cisco found
that the actual number was
closer to 730.3
1 - “CIOs keep trying to defy cloud gravity” by Matt Asay, TechRepublic http://www.techrepublic.com/article/cios-keep-trying-to-defy-cloud-gravity/
2 - “Gartner Predicts” by Gartner Group, 2016 http://www.gartner.com/binaries/content/assets/events/keywords/infrastructure-operations-management/iome5/
gartner-predicts-for-it-infrastructure-and-operations.pdf
3 - “Do You Know the Way to Ballylickey? Shadow IT and the CIO Dilemma” By Nick Earle, Cisco http://blogs.cisco.com/cloud/shadow-it-and-the-cio-dilemma

SECURITY RISKS
Security risks are the biggest concern for most organizations. Just seven percent of
cloud services meet enterprise requirements for security, according to a recent report
by Skyhigh Networks.4 Nearly half of the respondents to a Cloud Security Alliance
survey claimed that the security of corporate data was their chief concern with regards
to Shadow IT.5
Shadow IT can cause security risks in many ways. These include:
• Opening a back door into enterprise data. People provisioning instances may
not protect them with the appropriate firewall settings. Because some cloud
accounts connect directly to the organization's systems, they unknowingly
open a back door to those systems. In this case, malicious users can get in
and access the organization’s sensitive data.
• Enabling DDoS attacks from the company’s domain. When people provision
instances without firewall protection, an attacker can break into the unprotected
instance, turn the server into a bot and use that bot as part of a bot network
performing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. And since they originate
from comapny's resources, these attacks can harm the company’s reputation.
• Circumventing security policies. An employee might open an unauthorized
network port on a firewall so he or she can work on company projects from
a remote location— such ascoffee shop, home or airport, and then neglect to
close the access point, creating a backdoor that malicious intruders can enter.
Shadow Cloud Risks
Lack of visibility and control over shadow cloud resources leads to numerous
security, compliance and cost risks for organizations.
4 - “Cloud Adoption and Risk Report Q2 2015” by Skyhigh Networks http://info.skyhighnetworks.com/WP-CARR-Q2-2015_Download_White.html?Source=website&LSourc
e=website
5 -“Cloud Adoption Practices & Priorities Survey Report” by CSA Security Alliance, January 2015 https://downloads.cloud-
securityalliance.org/initiatives/surveys/capp/Cloud_Adoption_Practices_Priorities_Survey_Final.pdf
5

• Inadequately restricting permissions. Employees might use cloud services
such AWS S3 Buckets for storing files. Although they can apply permissions,
40 percent of Fortune 500 companies have accounts that are too permissive
and consequently leak company data. Shadow IT removes IT’s ability to protect
and monitor that data.
• Incorrectly implementing policies. When an organization creates user accounts
that can access cloud services, IT may want to employ two-factor authentication,
such as a Smartphone and a pin or fingerprint, to validate that the user is who
they say they are. With Shadow IT, this policy may not be enforced.
COMPLIANCE
Another pressing issue for organizations with regards to Shadow IT is compliance.
A CSA survey found that 25 percent of respondents said compliance is their second
biggest concern.6 When cloud-based applications are procured without the knowledge
or approval of IT, the organization loses its ability to address both regulatory and
corporate compliance issues.
Regulatory compliance. Regulations often demand that organizations implement
specified controls and document their usage. However, a CSP (Cloud Service Provider)
may not apply identity management, access control, backup or other practices required
by various regulations to protect data, potentially exposing it to unauthorized access
and compliance violations.
For example, SOX requires internal controls for ensuring accuracy and integrity of data
in financial reports by requiring that information be verifiable and traceable. When
data is handled by systems procured via Shadow IT, those systems are not necessarily
subject to these security controls or audit capabilities.
Even if the resources implement required controls, they may violate the compliance-
related documentation requirements.
Corporate compliance issues. Shadow cloud instances may not adhere to corporate
guidelines. For example, one organization had a policy that required users to run cloud
resources only in the East Coast region of AWS. Because Amazon doesn’t display all of
a company’s resources in one view, if someone spins up resources on the West Coast
or in Japan, IT may not realize that resources exist in those unauthorized regions.
6 - Cloud Adoption Practices & Priorities Survey Report” by CSA Security Alliance, January 2015 https://downloads.cloud-
securityalliance.org/initiatives/surveys/capp/Cloud_Adoption_Practices_Priorities_Survey_Final.pdf

COST
Uncontrolled costs are another huge issue for companies with Shadow IT. Gartner
client inquiries showed that it is not uncommon for public cloud service bills be 2X
to 3X higher than expected.7 Typical cost risks encountered with shadow IT include:
• An inability to gauge actual costs. Cloud providers won’t go out of their way
to show what their services really cost. They’ll claim the service only costs
38 cents per hour but won’t state the cost of running the resource 24x7x365.
Users selecting services can easily make uninformed decisions with regards
to ongoing or extended service costs.
• Excessive usage fees. When an unprotected service is compromised and then
used to launch a DDoS attack, costs skyrocket. Public clouds charge based on
usage when data is transferred off the network. If malware on a compromised
service is engaging in a DDoS attack and initiates massive amounts of traffic
from an account, the account owner can be on the hook for thousands of
dollars. Since IT may not know that the resources exist, this traffic and the
associated charges can continue unchecked for long periods of time.
• Duplicate services. Costs can spiral as businesses unknowingly purchase
duplicate services.
• Over-Provisioned resources. Users may over-provision because they want to
make sure they have enough horsepower. After all, why would anyone want
a Hyundai when they can have a Ferrari at the click of a button? Gartner
found that many clients have asset utilization of just 10 percent to 20 percent
suggesting there is significant room for optimization in usage and cost.8
WHAT'S A NEEDED IN A SOLUTION
End users understand that IT needs to sanction cloud resources... after all no one
wants the hassle or personal liability of having done something wrong. But, they still
demand rapid access to cloud services and compute capacity.
IT is well aware that it can’t prevent end users from chasing flexible solutions to their
business needs or leveraging powerful cloud services from a wide variety of service
providers. But IT does need visibility into what services end users provision and the
ability to ensure that users adhere to high level policies for usage and security.
7 - Cloud Adoption Practices & Priorities Survey Report” by CSA Security Alliance, January 2015 https://downloads.cloudsecurityalliance.org
/initiatives/surveys/capp/Cloud_Adoption_Practices_Priorities_Survey_Final.pdf
8 - “Gartner Report Shows IT Catch 22 and the Need for Cloud Automation” by Ryan Schradin, April 28, 2016, Cloud Sprawl
http://www.cloudsprawl.net/gartner-report-shows-it-catch-22-and-the-need-for-cloud-automation/
7

DivvyCloud provides comprehensive, real-time visibility of virtual resources and allows
IT to define and enforce corporate policies regarding cloud provisioning and ongoing
operations. The system can automatically discover everything running in public and
private clouds and identify noncompliant resources as defined by company policy.
DivvyCloud also tracks state changes in real time, conducts policy checks against
those changes, and can take steps to automatically “heal” cloud resources back to a
compliance state with those policies. This is often known as “self-healing infrastructure.”
DivvyCloud is distinguished by the following capabilities:
• Cloud agnostic. DivvyCloud can identify and track a broad range of compute,
storage, network and advanced resources across a broad range of public and
private cloud platforms. It treats all servers the same according to company
policy, whether they’re Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute
Platform, VMware or Openstack deployments.
• Provisioning agnostic. Cloud resources can be provisioned via any provisioning
method, whether through cloud provider portals, an automated provisioning
or DevOps tool, DivvyCloud or a traditional CMP (Cloud Management Platform).
DivvyCloud provides post-provisioning visibility, policy compliance and
optimization.
• Automated actions. Many tools monitor and notify administrators but don't
take any action to address compliance issues. Once DivvyCloud detects an
issue, it can take action to automatically apply the appropriate policy on the
fly. DivvyCloud enables full resource lifecycle controls across clouds.
• Extensible platform. Many software products require administrators to conform
to their unique way of doing things. DivvyCloud provides an extensible platform
that can be tailored using plugins and addons. This allows organizations to
design automated policies and integrations that meet their unique business
requirements, without being limited by DivvyCloud conventions.
Addressing Shadow Cloud with DivvyCloud

• Community policy bots. Customers can take advantage of a growing body of
prebuilt policy automation bots. Common policy automation bots ship with
the core software, including scheduled instances, cloud region control, and
instance type control. Additional from DivvyCloud, customers or individual
technologists are available on DivvyCloud’s Bot Repository.
• Contextual understanding of cloud resources. Simplistic monitoring solutions
that enable IT to set narrowly defined thresholds for notifications are not robust
enough for the complex, organic and interdependent nature of cloud computing.
DivvyCloud understands the operational interdependencies between compute,
storage, network and security services. Policies and automatic remediation
can be implemented based on multiple, interdependent actions within the
cloud infrastructure.
• Retroactive policy compliance. Many tools establish policies when the
infrastructure is provisioned. But if policies need to be changed, the organization
must tear down the system, change the configuration and relaunch. With
DivvyCloud, when a policy is altered, DivvyCloud scans the network, finds
resources that have become noncompliant, and automatically brings the
environment back into compliance. DivvyCloud also discovers environments
not created through a central provisioning tool and can apply policies to those
environments.
BENEFITS
With DivvyCloud, organizations can address key security, compliance and cost concerns
that they’re likely to encounter with Shadow IT.
Improve security
DivvyCloud is able to address potential security breaches and prevents DDoS attacks
through its enforcement of enforce security policies. DivvyCloud detects security
policy violations as they occur and automatically brings the service into compliance.
For example, DivvyCloud can detect and enforce policies preventing "users" from
provisioning a server without a firewall, opening a port, employing an account without
correct access permissions, or accessing a service without two-factor authentication.
DivvyCloud can even track SSL certificate expirations and ensure that all SSL certificates
are signed and not expired.
Because DivvyCloud allows organizations to set a baseline above which traffic shouldn’t
go, it can stop DDoS attacks in their tracks. If a network is compromised and uses the
9

network to launch a DDoS attack, DivvyCloud will reveal the unusually large amount
of outbound traffic, suspend the service and prompt an investigation.
Enforce compliance
Both regulatory and corporate compliance are enhanced with DivvyCloud. Organizations
can use Divvycloud to enforce compliance across all cloud environments. Audit trails
demonstrate that controls are being followed and provide documentation of remediation
steps taken to correct any issues.
Control Costs
The visibility and policy enforcement DivvyCloud provides also enables organizations
to keep a handle on cloud service costs. The platform provides insight into actual
service costs to help users make more intelligent decisions regarding what to provision.
Organizations can create policies to set guard rails around what class of resources end
users can configure. Because it enables organizations to set baselines on outgoing
traffic and sends alerts when those are exceeded, DivvyCloud enables organizations
to avoid excessive data usage costs in the event of a DDoS event.
By providing visibility into resource consumption, DivvyCloud also enables organizations
to optimally size their cloud resources. For a Fortune 1000 company with thousands
of servers, even a 10 percent cost reduction can translate into millions of dollars in
savings.
10 Shine the light on Shadow IT with active policy enforcement and cloud automation10 Shine the light on Shadow IT with active policy enforcement and cloud automation

With DivvyCloud, cloud resources provisioned by groups across an organization can
now come out from the shadows. Business users retain the flexibility to access the
resources they need to compete in a demanding business environment. IT gains the
visibility and control necessary to ensure that the IT environment remains secure,
compliant and cost effective.
For more information visit www.DivvyCloud.com or contact us at info@divvycloud.com.
Conclusion
11

DIVVYCLOUD
1400 Key Blvd
Level A, Suite #6
Arlington, VA 22209
www.divvycloud.com

Bringing Cloud Computing Out of the Shadows: Shine the light on Shadow IT with active policy enforcement and cloud automation

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Bringing Cloud Computing Out of the Shadows: Shine the light on Shadow IT with active policy enforcement and cloud automation