The discussion of consumerization of IT is too focused on devices, said Brian Madden, blogger at brianmadden.com and editor at TechTarget. There's no need to talk about "locking down" device sprawl. We already have technologies to deal with Macs, iPads, Androids, and iPhones. IT departments are missing the real threat and that's cloud services where the average consumer has extremely easy access to purchase massive quantities of IT power.
Madden explains with three very common scenarios:
• IT departments create a secure storage service for their employees, and employees essentially ignore it and choose DropBox.
• IT departments lock down all the wireless networking and set up VPN access within their business, yet employees choose to connect to the Internet via a MiFi or 3G card.
• IT departments impose email storage limits on the company's email servers. To sidestep this limitation, employees forward their corporate email to Gmail or another cloud-based mail provider.
IT departments can't control this behavior or can they even know it's going on. In order to make corporate data safe, IT departments have to rethink their draconian "you can't do that" protections.
