Shadow IT: make it easy for users to follow the rules

The usage of SaaS applications has significantly increased over the past decade, reaching $145 billion in global spending in 2021 and projected to reach $171 billion in 2022. However, this growth presents challenges for CIOs and security teams due to the lack of required security controls or visibility in many SaaS applications. The rise of remote work has made it difficult for IT teams to monitor application usage, leading to an increase in "shadow IT" – unapproved applications used by employees without IT knowledge. Cloudflare for Teams has updated its Zero Trust platform to address these challenges, providing a framework to identify new applications, block them, and provide access to approved ones. The platform also offers features such as blocking the right applications with meaningful error messages, protecting approved applications through secure authorization and audit trails, and making it easy for users to access all their approved applications in one place.