Going Rogue with Google Docs

A few days ago Palo Alto Networks, a leading manufacturer of enterprise firewall solutions, released its latest semiannual end-user application usage report. The report is based on the analysis of the network traffic that passes through Palo Alto Network’s firewalls deployed on the edge of corporate networks. In other words, the study reflects objective application usage data, not self-reported usage common in this type of research. While there is a bunch of interesting findings in the study, the one that caught my attention was a 300% increase in the use Google Docs (measured as the number of sessions and the bandwidth consumed). The report also states that the use of Google Docs was registered in 82% of the participating companies.

This is huge, isn’t it? But wait a second, how did I miss the big news that enterprise adoption of Google Docs had skyrocketed over the last 6 months?  The Google Apps for Business page doesn’t seem to suggest anything out of the ordinary – the standard sluggishly growing list of adopter companies. The usual suspects, TechnoCrunch, Mashable etc., seem to be silent on the issue as well. So, there must be something else in play here. But what is it?

What we’re dealing here, I think, is unauthorized use of GoogleDocs initiated by employees.  Or the way security folks would put it “rogue” deployments of Google Docs. A 300% jump in rogue deployments -that can’t be good, can it? But why do employees start using GoogleDocs on their own? GoogleDocs is no YouTube, Facebook, or even Twitter for that matter. You can’t really do much with it for fun. It is a personal productivity suite, an online collaborative workspace, and most people would use it …well, for work. What this suggests, perhaps, is that employees turn to Google Docs when a particular project or task requires them to collaborate with others inside and outside of the organization in an easy and unrestricted fashion. They need to be able to start such collaboration pretty much on-demand, but the current enterprise business apps infrastructure at most firms has very little to offer in that department. Hence, a 300% jump in the use of Google Docs.

There is no question that IT departments have the means necessary to shut down the use of Google Docs or other similar cloud apps from within corporate networks. But would this be the right thing to do? As individual users have become accustomed to simple, customizable, and unrestricted ways to connect and interact with people online in their personal lives, they will increasingly expect a similar degree of flexibility and control at work. It doesn’t have to be Google Docs, but the need for an integrated collaborative user-driven enterprise platform has arrived and is here to stay. It’s time now for corporate IT to step up to the plate and work together with the users to put such a platform in place. Everybody will win in the end - the users will become more productive, the company – more agile, and the IT department – well, the IT folks as usual will remain the “unsung heroes”.