A priori, it seems contradictory ! Shadow IT, although the term is controversial, is the not-officially approved use of IT resources. A practice that is widely popularized with the arrival of Cloud and SaaS solutions.

Shadow IT is by definition the uncontrolled part of IT, so as such it can not be considered normal.

Steroids for innovation and business agility

Yet we also know that it may be an important accelerator for innovation in companies.

The possibility for projects and business units to immediately use tools (SaaS) and infrastructure (IaaS / PaaS) they need, when they need it and without involving long-term commitment, greatly increases their ability to deliver new services or new functionality.

An anarchic situation ?

If you look at things from the perspective of the IT department or the management, this situation doesn’t seem quite acceptable. They may consider, in the best case, that the dispersion of software solutions or infrastructure solutions is not optimal (no global negotiation with suppliers, less sharing of experience between users, …). In the worst case, they can say the situation is totally unacceptable since only official solutions should be used, to ensure safety, compliance with various regulatory requirements, the ability of internal IT to provide support, …

A reality which is here to stay

Whichever perspective you take, reality is that the use of SaaS and Cloud is increasing in large and small businesses, in official mode and in “Shaddow IT” mode. So it seems relevant to ask the question of overall control of the situation.

Tooling, a possible solution

Ideally, we are trying to enable

  • companies to grab the benefits coming with Cloud and SaaS usage
  • global control at the IT level, in particular financial control

One way to achieve this is to use tools that would globally monitor the costs incurred through all usages of Cloud and SaaS solutions within the enterprise, “shadow” or official.


Costs Cloud Tracking, Analytics and Management

Which tools  ? We’re talking about tools that would provide :

  • a comprehensive, centralized list of real-time costs incurred,
  • ways to analyze, filter, categorize, sort these cloud spendings, including the ability to allocate these spendings,
  • icing on the cake, these tools should also allow you to see if these resources are used optimally. They are no longer controlled by a central entity - the IT departement - so multiple little waste here and there may eventually lead to significant costs.

Finally, we would be glad if these tools can help companies with the administrative management of the many “micro sources of costs” which quickly becomes a nightmare to deal with at the accounting level, especially when such costs should be re-billed.

It is this vision that guides us in building the Teevity CloudCostservice.

And, until we deal with all the problems described here, you can already track all your cloud expenses in real-time.