Masergy has taken up hunting but, unlike the cartoon character Elmer Fudd, it's not "wabbits" the SD-WAN service provider is after. Instead the company is on the lookout for shadow IT, and its new Shadow IT Discovery feature aims to be much more successful at capturing its quarry than Fudd.

With this new feature, Masergy wants to make it easier for its SD-WAN customers to identify and address unauthorized use of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

“With more than half of all enterprise workloads now running in [infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service], or SaaS, securing enterprise access to multiple clouds is crucial,” said John Burke, principal research analyst at Nemertes Research, in a prepared statement. “Shadow IT in the form of the proliferation of unsanctioned cloud solutions cannot be ignored, and integrating shadow IT discovery into a managed SD-WAN offering, as Masergy has done, gives crucial new visibility to IT teams with minimal added effort.”

Shadow IT is a particular challenge that can adversely impact application performance by chewing up bandwidth and vastly expand the attack surface. According to a recent Gartner report, a third of successful attacks experienced by enterprises will gain access on shadow resources.

According to Ray Watson, VP of innovation at Masergy, shadow IT can be any number of things ranging from an innocuous app like Dropbox running on an employee's computer to an outdated piece of software that poses a significant risk to the rest of the network.

But finding these instances of shadow IT can be tricky and that's where Masergy's Shadow IT Discovery feature comes in.

It is is designed to search out these unauthorized SaaS apps and rank the perceived threat to the network on a scale from one to five. This feature eliminates much of the guesswork involved in identifying vulnerabilities due to shadow IT and can eliminate the reliance on endpoint security services, according to the service provider.

“Masergy stands committed to helping global enterprises leverage the cloud with certainty, giving them the visibility they need to control access without disrupting the productivity benefits that cloud applications deliver,” said Terry Traina, chief digital officer at Masergy, in a statement.

Today's announcement comes just months after the company unveiled its AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) feature set, which is designed to identify opportunities for networking, security, and application optimization.

At the time of its release, Masergy billed AIOps as a virtual engineer that lives in Masergy's Intelligent Service Control dashboard. It was designed to mine data using a combination of anomaly detection and predictive analytics to surface relevant data and recommendations for how customers can improve application performance, predict bandwidth needs, and optimize network throughput.

However, with the launch of Shadow IT Discovery, Masergy has offered a glimpse of the future to come.

According to Watson Masergy's AIOps platform will eventually be able to automate the process by addressing unauthorized SaaS apps discovered by Shadow IT Discovery, according to Watson. However, he notes that several advancements will have to occur before that capability is realized.

For now, Shadow IT Discovery is limited to identifying unauthorized SaaS apps on the network and the company has yet to implement integrated remediation tools into the service.