The Shadow Supply Chain: A 72.9% Gap In Your Vendor Inventory | UpGuard

The Shadow Supply Chain report analyzes anonymized telemetry from 20 organizations and finds a ~72.9% gap between approved vendors and actual application usage, arguing that employee-driven adoption of web-based tools creates a hidden, high‑risk vendor ecosystem that traditional vendor risk management and procurement processes fail to govern. The paper categorizes common shadow usage scenarios (document editing, departmental project management, engineering diagramming), quantifies unmonitored users per tool, and calls for a governance model that follows user behavior rather than purchase intent.