A little more than a decade ago, I was responsible for the rollout of cloud products at a large multinational corporation. When I would meet with chief information officers to discuss our capabilities, the No. 1 concern I would hear about is rogue IT, or as it’s more commonly known, “shadow IT.” It seems back then that anyone with a credit card and a problem was turning up virtual machines completely under the radar of IT. As Getty Lee from the band Rush states in the song “Circumstances,” “Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” Translation: “The more that things change, the more they stay the same.” Because a second wave of shadow IT is coming.

Software developers, marketers and others across the enterprise would often bypass their own IT department to avoid standing in line for all those pesky compliance checks, budget approvals and the heap of IT purchase requests. All they had to do was use their corporate or personal card to access compute and storage on Amazon or another cloud provider and they were off and running with their new application. This was convenient for them, but wreaked havoc on the organization’s control, compliance and grasp on spend. This also resulted in cloud or “IT sprawl” in which various applications grow virally in department silos while lacking the ability to leverage data and functionality across the enterprise. These isolated islands of intellectual property and business insight can easily be under leveraged, misused, or worse, stolen.

Despite being identified and understood in terms of root causes, this trend continues today and has the potential to expand in new directions. Now, as we look to leverage access to space-based resources, such as Starlink satellites, we see the same trend emerging.

We’re hearing from some of our customers that this high level of interest, specifically in Starlink, is leading to these kinds of noncompliant purchases. Think about it: You only need to buy one unit and you’re up and running in the constellation. You no longer need a transponder and to build a network into the satellite service downlink site. What Elon Musk has done for satellite connectivity is what Jeff Bezos did for computer servers: provide great performance and coverage and make it easily consumable. All the customer has to do now is go to a website with a credit card — way faster than going through purchasing and IT.

This is a quick fix for any random user but it sets up several other issues:

• There’s a fiduciary issue — the agency wouldn’t know how much they’re spending if they can’t keep track of rogue users.
• The agency can’t assess its full buying power for Starlink if it doesn’t know how much it’s consuming.
• It could create a security issue. What is that shadow user plugging Starlink into? Starlink is essentially internet access, so the devices connected to it are inherently on the internet. If not integrated properly, agency data could be compromised.

Managing space network access

A number of tools such as cloud access service brokers (CASB) were used by IT to reign in shadow IT users. Like cloud computing, satellite service needs to be managed properly. These are recommendations based on best practices in my experience.

• Ensure access to an omniscient portal and dashboard for an overview of your satellite services and strong reporting. Your billing support system should be granular enough so each user can see their own usage and reporting but it also rolls up to senior IT management to reveal organization-wide metrics. This is critical for assessing agency buying power and the low earth orbit (LEO) satellite provider’s performance. How else can you make informed future buying decisions?
• Consolidate your individual user accounts and pay one bill to the satellite provider. But make sure you can break the billing data down to see where the service is being over- or underutilized.
• Leverage artificial intelligence and automation to ensure you’re getting the most out of your LEO access service. AI can anticipate and detect trouble before it fully manifests and help resolve it with or without human assistance much faster than humans can alone.
• Add a higher level of support. A traditional customer support model will allow humans to escalate if your expectations aren’t being met or your concerns are not being resolved to your satisfaction.
• Or bring a managed services partner in that can handle it all for you.

Managing your space-based network access responsibly guarantees greater performance, security and cost efficiency, and will bring it into compliance with the regulations and practices that govern your IT and network resources. The sky may no longer be the limit for enterprise communications, but bringing it down to earth and under control is key to understanding and unlocking its full value.

Don Parente is the vice president of sales and solution architecture for MetTel Federal.

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