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Security isn't the only buzzkill with bring your own cloud

Everyone now wants to bring their own cloud to work. Obviously, security is a risk. There are other concerns as well.
Written by Joe McKendrick, Contributing Writer

One of the effects, perhaps inevitable, is the arrival of bring your own cloud, or BYOC. This encompasses the use of such services as DropBox, Google Apps, and Office 365. There are risks with BYOC. 

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Photo: HubSpot

Security is the obvious risk, but there are other ways IT leaders should brace for the onslaught. Writing in InfoQ, Zenoss' Chris Smith advocates that IT and business leaders embrace rather than fight BYOC. However, IT leaders also need to be prepared for the risks that BYOC brings into the organization.

Here the risks of BYOC:

Increased complexity: "Having a number of unmonitored and unauthorized services running on your network introduces vulnerability and complexity to your infrastructure that must be brought under control. IT teams who are already struggling to reign in the complexity of their data center due to IT tool clutter and poor capacity planning now find themselves trying to monitor and manage services that are running in a domain outside of their control."

Straining of resources: Corporate networks may not be built to handle the surge in file sharing occuring through cloud services. Of course, it means less bandwidth for regular day-to-day work. work.

Costs: Nowadays, with BYOC and shadow IT, funds "are often being siphoned off to different business units, giving them the right to build their own infrastructure. IT has no say in how the added infrastructure is built-out, yet is still responsible for preventing and fixing malfunctions." When things go wrong, guess who gets the call? 

Security: "Organizations have little to no control over BYOC services because they are owned, or at least controlled, by employees, and are hosted by a third-party provider. An example of this is employees using their personal Box.net (File sharing and collaboration) account for work." Ripe territory for hackers. Also an opening for internal theft of data.

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