Employees Will Drag IT Into the Cloud

Recently I suggested that IT organizations should consider security as a reason to move to, not stay away from, cloud infrastructure. But there’s another reason why IT late-adopters will have to embrace more cloud services: Their company’s employees.

Most people in the industry are too young to remember, but Microsoft was once a plucky upstart, and they didn’t just wake up one day and start selling Office into the enterprise. Indeed, Microsoft was aware at the time that their best path to enterprise sales was knowledge workers going around their own IT departments and installing Word and Excel on corporate computers to make themselves more productive. When IT did start purchasing and administering Office licenses, it may have been less because they were riding the wave of the future and more because they needed to reassert control over their own infrastructure.

Fast-forward to today. The new generation of knowledge workers went through school using GSuite, Asana, Trello, and yes even Office 365 online instead of on the desktop. They aren’t going to settle for collaboration via emailing .DOC files. Unless the IT department is taking explicit actions to block them, they are almost certainly using the free versions of these services at work. Just like in the early days of Microosft Office, at some point IT will have no choice but to start sanctioning — and controlling — the use of productivity SaaS in their environments.