Dive Brief:

• The rise of Netskope demonstrates the significant problem shadow IT has become.

• The company, which helps businesses prevent employee use of shadow IT, grew its customer base 500% over the last year.

• Netskope just announced $75 million in funding from both former and new investors.
   

Dive Insight:

Businesses are struggling to figure out how to handle shadow IT — the unauthorized use of non-approved software and apps downloaded to the corporate cloud. Most businesses don’t want to block shadow IT, but they want to ensure confidential company information is protected.

Sanjay Beri, co-founder and CEO of Netskope, said, "Two years ago, we'd go into a customer, to the CIO, and they'd say 'gee, I didn't know we were using 400 cloud apps. Thanks for telling me that.'"... [Now] what they're looking for is, 'what am I going to do about it.' "

Netskope competitor Skyhigh has a similar mission, and the market for this type of software is likely to grow as CIOs recognize the extent of the problem.

A recent study from Cisco found that the typical firm has 15 to 22 times more cloud applications running in the workplace than have been authorized by the IT department. On average, CIOs surveyed estimated there were 51 cloud services running within their organization, but the actual number was about 730, according to Cisco's analysis.