And many of them are devices and applications used by employees may not be approved or issued by the IT team, and hence may elude their awareness. This means that these systems -- collectively known as shadow IT -- may not be protected by the enterprise’s cybersecurity measures and hence, may be vulnerable to hacks and data loss, putting the organization’s resources at risk. Such systems can also be misused without the awareness of the organization’s IT team’s knowledge and used to leak information outside the organization to competitors or the general public. And depending on the type of data leaked, such incidents may subject the organization to operational, reputational, as well as financial risks.

To prevent these risks, enterprises must have deep visibility into their networks and have cybersecurity systems that are advanced enough to protect against shadow IT devices. These capabilities are offered by contextually-intelligent next-generation firewall solutions. Such solutions can continually monitor all the devices and applications being used by your employees, regardless of whether they use on-premise or cloud applications. They can monitor and secure all data on the application level, thereby ensuring that your critical data remains within the safe confines of your organizational network.