…is that they’re consumer cloud services.
While we’re all focused heavily on the challenges of managing BYOD in the enterprise, we should not overlook or understate the impact of consumer-grade services within the enterprise. Just as employees bring their own devices to the table, so too do they bring a smattering of consumer-grade “cloud” services to the enterprise.
Such services are generally woefully inappropriate for enterprise use. They are focused on serving a single consumer, with authentication and authorization models that support that focus. There are no roles, generally no group membership, and there’s certainly no oversight from some mediating authority other than the service provider.
This is problematic for enterprises as it eliminates the ability to manage access for large groups of people, to ensure authority to access based on employee role and status, and provides no means of integration with existing ID management systems.