09 Nov 2026
Shadow IT domains are domains registered for your company without IT knowing: a marketing campaign site, a pilot tool, a product name grabbed by a founder on a personal card. They still carry your brand, but no one manages their renewals, DNS or security.
They are a quiet risk. This guide shows six ways to find them and how to bring them under control.
| Source | Example |
|---|---|
| Marketing agencies | Campaign microsites registered in the agency's account |
| Founders and early staff | Product names bought on personal cards |
| Product and engineering teams | Test, demo and tool domains |
| Acquisitions | Domains that came with an acquired company |
| Regional offices | Local country domains bought locally |
Record results in the template from our domain portfolio audit checklist.
Teams also create subdomains on your main domain for tools and tests. Some point to deleted cloud resources and invite takeovers. Read the subdomain takeover guide.
These steps are the heart of domain governance.
Client: Hospital and diagnostics group, Hyderabad
Challenge: IT's list had 25 domains. The real number was unknown.
What we did: Finance search, RDAP lookups, certificate logs and agency requests.
Results:
Client: Global capability centre, HITEC City
Challenge: Teams had created tools and pilots on subdomains and separate domains with no central record.
What we did: Zone exports, certificate log review, owner survey, clean-up and approval process.
Results:
Shadow IT domains are normal in growing companies. The risk comes from ignoring them. A short discovery exercise, a single inventory and a simple request process fix most of the problem.
Flying Stars runs discovery as part of domain portfolio management services, and our vCISO services bring it into your wider security programme.
