"Shadow IT" came out of the shadows during the late 1990s and emerged as a major force in enterprise computing. Fueled by a combination of factors, including greater business oversight and accountability for applications, advances in application development technologies that made "user authoring" of application possible, and hosted substitutes for traditional IT services, business lines have seized greater control over their computing resources and are loath to relinquish their new authorities. However, regulations that legally consolidate corporate accountability for data and data processing (e.g., SOx) coupled with dramatic increases in the costs of infrastructure to support user-orientated applications (e.g., image-rich applications that consume huge volumes of storage) are forcing at least a rethinking of the apportionment of roles and responsibilities between central and business IT groups. The availability of high-end NAS technologies can – and will – facilitate whatever degree of consolidation in user-orientated data processing a business chooses. However, the major battle will not be technological, but organizational: Will business give back control of distributed, end-user applications to IT?
Action Item: Adoption of high-end NAS technology as a vehicle for file-orientated storage consolidation will hinge less on the intrinsic quality of these technologies, and more on emerging authority relationships between IT and business groups. IT organizations should help the business achieve control over data by supporting storage consolidation efforts in ways that don’t necessarily demand broader, and usually more complex, application consolidation programs.
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