According to an analysis by McAfee’s cloud division, log data tracking the activities of some 200,000 government workers in the United States and Canada, show that the average agency uses 742 cloud services, on the order of 10 to 20 times more than the IT department manages. The use of unauthorized applications creates severe security risks, often resulting simply from employees trying to do their work more efficiently.
By category, collaboration tools like Office 365 or Gmail are the most commonly used cloud applications, according to McAfee’s analysis, with the average organization running 120 such services. Cloud-based software development services such as GitHub and Source Forge are a distant second, followed by content-sharing services. The average government employee runs 16.8 cloud services, according to the 2019 Cloud Adoption and Risk Report. Lack of awareness creates a Shadow IT problem that needs to be addressed. One of the challenges is that not all storage or collaboration services are created equally, and users, without guidance from the CIO, might opt for an application that has comparatively lax security controls, claims ownership of users’ data, or one that might be hosted in a country that the government has placed trade sanctions on.
To help address the growing challenge of security gaps in IT cloud environments, Congressmen Gerry Connolly (D-VA), Chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s Government Operations Subcommittee, and Mark Meadows (R-NC), Ranking Member of the Government Operations Subcommittee, recently introduced the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Authorization Act (H.R. 3941). The l ..
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