What Is Shadow IT and How to Stop It?
June 17, 2025 | 5 min read
Imagine this: your marketing team connects a third-party email tool to send out a time-sensitive campaign. It works. Leads respond. Everyone’s happy until your IT team realizes that emails are going out from your company domain via a platform they’ve never approved, reviewed, or secured.
It was not malicious or intentional, but it opened a door to Shadow IT. What seems like a harmless workaround can quietly put your domain, data, and entire email infrastructure at risk. Most organizations don’t realize this is happening until something breaks.
Shadow IT isn’t just an IT issue anymore, it’s a growing business challenge. In this blog, we’ll break down what Shadow IT is, why it’s so widespread, the risks it poses, and most importantly, how you can get ahead of it before it becomes a serious threat.
What Is Shadow IT?
Shadow IT refers to any software, app, service, or device used by employees without formal IT approval or oversight. It’s born out of good intentions: speed, productivity, and convenience. However, it grows in the blind spots of your organization’s security strategy.
In the modern, cloud-first workplace, shadow IT isn’t just a nuisance, it’s an inevitable reality.
Real-world examples include:
- A developer deploying a testing environment using their personal GitHub account
- A marketing team launching an email campaign from an unvetted tool like Mailchimp or HubSpot.
- Sales connecting third-party CRM tools to your domain via SMTP
- Executives using personal Zoom or Google Meet accounts for sensitive discussions
- Finance automating reports via unapproved API-based tools
These tools don’t just live on desktops or browsers anymore, they often send email on your behalf, handling one of the most visible and vulnerable parts of your infrastructure: your domain.
Why Does Shadow IT Happen?
Shadow IT usually isn’t malicious. It happens because people are trying to do their jobs and the approved tools don’t always meet their needs. Common reasons include the following:
- Slow procurement processes
- Lack of awareness about approved options
- Remote work environments where boundaries blur
- Frustration with outdated or complex IT systems
- Innovation gaps where departments want to move faster than IT can support
In short, people find workarounds and those workarounds eventually impact email infrastructure in ways IT can’t see or secure.
Risks Associated with Shadow IT
While shadow IT often begins with good intentions- speed, convenience, or flexibility – the risks it introduces can be catastrophic. Left unchecked, these tools create serious blind spots for IT and security teams, expose sensitive data, and threaten both operational continuity and your organization’s reputation.
Below are the most critical risks organizations face when shadow IT is left to grow in the dark:
Security Vulnerabilities
Shadow IT tools typically bypass the organization’s vetting process. They may lack basic encryption, expose APIs without authentication, or store data in unsecured cloud environments. Even trusted third-party tools can become dangerous if misconfigured or outdated. Without visibility into these services, IT teams can’t patch vulnerabilities or respond to incidents – making shadow IT an ideal entry point for attackers.
Compliance Violations
Industries governed by GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, or other frameworks must ensure full control over where data is stored, who accesses it, and how it’s protected. Shadow IT breaks this chain of custody. Sensitive emails, client data, or employee records sent through unauthorized tools may reside on servers outside your jurisdiction or in breach of data retention policies – leaving your business open to fines, lawsuits, or reputational damage.
Loss of Visibility and Control
You can’t secure what you can’t see. Shadow IT services often operate completely outside of standard monitoring and logging infrastructure. Security teams lose insight into usage patterns, access history, and data movement. If a breach occurs, tracing its origin through a shadow tool can become nearly impossible – delaying incident response and increasing damage.
Data Loss and Leakage
Unauthorized services used for file sharing, messaging, or email may lack proper backups or redundancy. In the event of a tool failure, files and communication records may be permanently lost. Worse yet, employees using personal accounts or apps without encryption could accidentally – or maliciously – leak sensitive company data.
Broken Workflows and Incompatibility
Shadow IT tools rarely integrate with sanctioned systems, which leads to duplication of work, sync failures, and broken workflows. Teams may waste hours manually transferring data between platforms or fixing formatting errors- lowering overall productivity and increasing the chance of human error.
Email Deliverability and Spoofing Risks
One of the most dangerous and overlooked shadow IT issues arises when unsanctioned services send email on behalf of your domain. Marketing platforms, CRM systems, or automation tools often connect via SMTP or API – without SPF, DKIM, or DMARC alignment. This erodes your domain reputation, increases bounce rates, and can result in legitimate messages being flagged as spam. Worse still, attackers can exploit this gap to impersonate your brand and launch phishing campaigns.
Ineffective Offboarding
When employees leave, IT may not be aware of the shadow tools they used – leaving those tools with ongoing access to company data or email systems. Without visibility, access can’t be revoked, increasing the risk of data leaks or account misuse long after departure.
How to Stop Shadow IT
Eliminating Shadow IT doesn’t mean banning everything. It means regaining control and providing employees with safe, supported alternatives.
Here’s how to start:
- Educate Your Teams Make employees aware of the risks and the importance of approved tools. Frame IT as a partner, not a gatekeeper.
- Implement Discovery Tools Use network monitoring or CASBs (Cloud Access Security Brokers) to uncover what tools are being used.
- Streamline App Approval Create a lightweight process for requesting new tools, so employees don’t feel forced to go around IT.
- Enforce Strong Email Authentication Shadow tools that send email using your domain are a major vector for abuse. Without proper safeguards, these unauthorized apps can damage your domain’s reputation or worse.
Protect Your Organization with Skysnag
Shadow IT poses significant challenges for organizations but also underscores the importance of flexible, secure, and user-friendly IT solutions. Tackling shadow IT requires a comprehensive strategy, yet one critical aspect is often overlooked: email security.
Email remains the backbone of business communication and is a prime target for cybercriminals. Unauthorized email usage, one of the most common forms of shadow IT, can expose your organization to phishing attacks, data breaches, and compliance risks.
In larger organizations, any department might launch an email sending service without IT’s knowledge. For example, marketing teams often set up platforms like MailChimp or HubSpot independently. When multiple departments do this, tracking and managing all email senders becomes overwhelming, complicating efforts to maintain strong email security.
This is where Skysnag steps in, to close the loop between shadow IT and email infrastructure.
- Our all-in-one platform provides automated email authentication and monitoring, so you always know who’s sending on your behalf and whether they’re authorized to do so.
- Authenticates all senders using your domain to block unauthorized email activity
- Stops exact-domain spoofing and impersonation to protect your brand reputation
- Enforces SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MTA-STS, and TLS-RPT to ensure email security compliance
- Uncovers hidden sending services and shadow IT for full visibility and control
- Delivers real-time alerts and actionable insights to prevent breaches before they happen
Skysnag helps you secure your domain, enforce email authentication policies, and eliminate unauthorized senders – all from one intuitive dashboard.
Try Skysnag today and bring your organization’s email security out of the shadows.
