Selling IT in the shade

I was interested in reading a recent Nasuni survey on the adoption of public cloud storage and although seeing 22% of C-level executives adopting Dropbox came as no surprise, it reminded me of a conversation I had with a marketeer from a secure enterprise collaboration company.

I approached him to see if their company would be interested in speaking about providing secure collaboration solutions to a number of UK companies. We discussed how CIOs were looking at providing secure alternatives to “shadow IT” solutions such as Dropbox.

While we spoke it occurred to me that the same companies that provide the solutions are also the same people feeding the problem. By releasing free insecure versions they are bypassing the IT departments, creating the need for much more secure, enterprise-grade solutions within the business.

How do CIOs avoid being sidelined in this way?