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Survey finds public sector employees use unmanaged cloud services just as much as private employees. The numbers show just how rampant the shadow cloud problem is in government networks that, in theory at least, should be better locked down than private sector networks, says Rajiv Gupta, CEO of Skyhigh.

The Skyhigh report follows a similar study by CipherCloud, which showed that a staggering 86 percent of cloud services consumed by employees at private companies were unsanctioned by IT. An earlier report by Frost & Sullivan on behalf of McAfee found that even when cloud services are formally purchased by business groups, there's a good chance that at least 35 percent of the purchases will happen without any IT oversight.

Gupta said that Skyhigh's analysis of cloud service usage among public sector employees showed the most popular categories to be collaboration, file sharing, content sharing and software development related sites.

Examples of cloud services include online data storage and backup solutions, Web-based e-mail services, hosted office suites and document collaboration services, database processing, managed technical support services and more.

In analogy to above usage the word cloud was used as a metaphor for the Internet and a standardized cloud-like shape was used to denote a network on telephony schematics and later to depict the Internet in Cloud Services computer network diagrams With this simplification, the implication is that the specifics of how the end points of a network are connected are not relevant for the purposes of understanding the diagram.