One of the biggest threats to organizations today is shadow IT—unsanctioned and unknown technologies and applications being employed by maverick users. Shadow IT represents a security risk for your company—the IT department can’t defend and protect technologies and assets it doesn’t know about—and should be eliminated. One of the best defenses against shadow IT is DevOps.

When I worked in the trenches as a one-man IT department—part network admin, part tech support—there always were one or two individuals who knew enough to be dangerous. As frustrating as it was to deal with completely clueless users who didn’t know the difference between the computer and the monitor and weren’t even really sure where the power button was, those who knew enough to go rogue and reconfigure their devices or introduce new applications and services were a more existential problem for the organization. In today’s era of BYOD and cloud services, shadow IT is a scourge significantly greater than what I faced.

Don’t get me wrong—I’ve also been on the other side of that equation and I understand the motivation that drives shadow IT. Users just want to get their jobs done, and the people in the trenches know better than anyone what the hurdles are and how to fix them. Requesting new technologies or capabilities from IT is a cumbersome and tedious process at many organizations, so in the name of expediency users just do what they need to do on their own.

DevOps can help solve the shadow IT problem in a better and more sustainable way, though. There are two benefits that DevOps brings to the table that minimize the potential for shadow IT: More rapid development and empowering individuals.

First, an IT organization that has embraced DevOps will be quicker to respond to requests from users. Replacing the traditional software development life cycle with a more agile and continuous pace of development means that feature requests can be incorporated much faster.

Second, one of the cornerstones of DevOps is the underlying culture—the breaking down of silos and removal of barriers and bureaucratic nonsense that get in the way of efficient progress. Essentially, those rogue technologies and applications that comprise shadow IT in other organizations are simply a part of the larger DevOps whole in an organization that has embraced DevOps. There is even a term ascribed to users outside of traditional IT/developer roles who develop solutions: “citizen developers.”

The 2015 State of Citizen Development Report explains in more detail what a citizen developer is: “Citizen Developers are empowered problem-solvers from the various lines of business who have the drive and determination to engage in app development even though they lack traditional coding skills.”

That isn’t to suggest that in a DevOps world everyone can just go set up virtual servers, or store data on personal cloud services and that it’s OK. It just means that when users are given the tools and freedom to develop solutions that have the blessing of IT and the rest of the organization, they don’t need to function in the shadows.

Embracing DevOps and the citizen developer movement enables IT to work in harmony with users to develop solutions that work rather than fighting against each other and ending up with shadow IT servers, applications and cloud services that IT isn’t even aware of. Organizations that are concerned about the impact of shadow IT should look at ways to harness the power rather than just trying to ban shadow IT completely.