The volume of users using third party apps has increased significantly and with that, the security risk for the enterprises that third-party apps poses.
Problem arises from those apps that ask for the access permission from the user for the sake of authorization, user needs to provide his credentials and hence giving the access to the corporate network, and the riskiest part is that it just not poses security risk when they are in use but even when they are not in use, app continues to be active even when no one is using them, user might not have even used them for years but the apps will continue to have programmatic access to the user’s data.
The major problem which needs to be taken care of is addressing the issue of Shadow IT.
Now the question arises that what is Shadow IT?
There are IT security teams in every enterprise which give permission to access a particular application or system, but some apps does not need permission to access user’s data which could be extremely risky since it does not ask for the approval from security team, an example of one of the technologies that cause risk is OAuth, it is an authentication protocol which allows user approve to apps without sharing the password which could result in giving OAuth connected applications, extensive access to corporate data.
In each organization, on an average 733 3rd-party apps are connected in which few of them are not necessarily risky by nature like games, music player, but risk can increase if they get compromised.
As a security measure, many apps have been blocked by the IT security teams like WhatsApp, power tools, free rider etc.
