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For some reason, the mere thought of the cloud in business can cause anxiety for the IT department. But working in the cloud should engender delight, not despair. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting a series of blogs to help you look at where you stand with cloud apps right now, and walk through the stages of acknowledging, appreciating and accepting the use of cloud apps within your workplace, examining the various stages of ‘app acceptance’ that many organizations grapple with:
- Denial (what cloud apps, where?)
- Anger (will you please stop uploading sensitive data!)
- Depression (I’ll never manage all these apps, I can’t go on)
- Acceptance (These cloud apps are actually great for business!)
Netskope did some research with IT decision makers across medium and large enterprises into the current state of cloud app use and I’ll be referencing the findings throughout the guide. This will hopefully show you that – when it comes to app acceptance – you are by no means on your own. There’s something in here to help every company, regardless of your current stance towards cloud apps.
As such, each blog post concludes with a few practical steps that you can take in order to reach app acceptance nirvana.
So if everyone is sitting comfortably, we’ll begin…
Stage 1: Denial
The ‘ignore it and hope it goes away’ mentality isn’t something to be ashamed of, and actually was a very common response revealed in our research – 18% of IT decision makers within medium and large businesses said they knew for a fact employees did not use any cloud apps within the organisation. In addition, almost half of the respondents to our study (42%) believed employees used cloud apps, but they were all sanctioned by IT.