Canva: The business productivity app flying under IT's radar

Canva's growing presence

Canva is, to put it briefly, a design and content platform meant to simplify the creation of creative assets -- everything from presentations and flyers to videos and social media posts. What stood out to me is how much of the creative workflow they've brought into a single suite. In IT, we often talk about fragmented tools and broken processes, which exists in content creation and production, too.

Canva has built a platform that unifies design, collaboration, approvals, and publishing. They're also layering in automation, AI, and enterprise data features, which is the really interesting part (more on that in a minute).

They're also quite large. Privately held, based in Australia, Canva is said to be valued upwards of $32 billion, with a reported 230 million monthly active users who create over a billion assets each month. The company’s growth has been primarily organic: users start with a free personal version, upgrade to the paid Pro version, and then move to Canva Teams once groups of employees start using it.

Canva introduced an Enterprise offering in 2024, adding extra controls and capabilities (and, ultimately, putting itself on my radar). Canva Enterprise adds brand enforcement and security features, while also allowing organizations to immediately "flip the switch" and convert personal accounts (with corporate data) to enterprise accounts.

The thing is, most Canva "deployments" are done at the individual or functional team level within organizations -- often without IT awareness. It's browser based, so there's often no helpdesk ticket to open for software installs or procurement hoops to jump through. Before long, an entire department is using it to create materials based on proprietary data, often without IT realizing it.

This is textbook shadow IT. But in this case, it's visual, collaborative, and tied to brand identity and messaging, as opposed to "ethernet cable under the data center door." And with AI (and now data) functionality, Canva's Visual Suite is quickly reaching the point where IT and security teams should know what it is.

To be clear, Canva isn't bad. But it is an app that's in widespread use, as well as an under-the-radar data egress point that should be considered when building out IT and security strategies.

Canva aims to be the system of record for branding

The same way IT aims to be the system of record for devices, systems, and access standards, Canva is positioning itself as the system of record for brand identity. That means centralizing logos, colors, fonts, and messaging, and enforcing them. It can even provide AI-based brand assistance, which detects when content strays off-brand. Wrong color? Wrong logo? Alert! (I'm thinking of a few salespeople that could use this right now.)

With this approach, brand integrity becomes enforceable across an entire company, even when non-designers are doing the work. Everyone can be a creator -- with guardrails.

AI is everywhere in Canva

Everywhere you look in Canva Visual Suite, you'll find AI features. Canva AI is the company's in-house digital assistant that helps you with all content creation-related tasks. There are lots of AI-based tools brought together under Canva's Magic Studio moniker. This includes:

• Magic Design: Allows users to start creating by typing in what they need;
• Dream Lab: Brand-compliant AI image generation;
• Highlights:  Automatic clip highlighting/extraction from videos;
• Magic Resize and Magic Expand: Changes asset sizes, formats, and even languages;
• Magic Media: Brand-compliant text-to-video, text-to-image, and text-to-graphic features that can live in any Canva asset;
• Magic Write: Text and full document generation that's brand compliant.

The point is that AI is everywhere you look inside Canva, seamlessly integrated as if it has always been there. Even if you think your users aren't using AI, if they're using Canva, they are.

Data is front and center

One of Canva's big pushes this year is around data visualization and integration -- something lots of workers struggle with, especially when trying to use data to tell a story visually.

At the event, the company introduced Canva Sheets, a customizable data layer accessible throughout Canva's Visual Suite 2.0 that uses AI to organize, analyze, and visualize data. Among the many tools that are part of this is Magic Formulas, which uses natural language prompts to accomplish things that would normally require Excel formula expertise.

When they announced this, the room erupted in applause. The enthusiasm is great, but it also means that we now have lots of new people who will be using corporate data in ways they may not have previously. This opens new questions for IT and security teams, like:

•  Where (and how) is this data stored?
• How is the data maintained when the same (or divergent) data might exist in two locations?
• Is it subject to the same data loss prevention (DLP) and governance policies as other apps?
• What happens when different AI models (which users don't control) are involved in processing it?

From my perspective on the IT side, this is objectively cool, but also something we need more awareness and visibility into.

I also can't help but wonder: Is Canva Sheets and this new data layer the kind of thing that will move Canva from a modern platform for creatives to a modern platform for work? We'll save that or another article. 

Turning designers into developers

 One of the most well-received announcements was Canva Code, a new AI feature that allows users to generate interactive designs with natural language prompts, including interactive tools like ROI calculators, mini games, or scrolling presentations. Using the new data capabilities, it could even be prompted to "create a slide showing the marketing budget for Q3."

I'm honestly not sure how I feel about this from an IT perspective. Canva Code will help creators create -- that seems fine to me -- but I can't shake the "what would happen if we told our users to play around with PowerShell" feeling.

Honestly, I think the same general concerns around visibility, governance, etc., regarding the data being used to create resources apply. If anyone can create interactive apps using Canva Code based on data that resides in the data layer accessible via Canva Sheets, we should know about it and consider moving these pockets of users to an enterprise-managed account.

If you've never used Canva, check it out. It's a great example of a modern company with a modern approach to creative work, workflows, and productivity, actively shaking up a space and building a devoted user base from the ground up. It's also a great example of how AI is infiltrating our lives -- not necessarily as a killer app that everyone uses, but as a collection of smaller, tactical solutions that, combined, provide a better overall experience, increases productivity, and, at least based on the reactions I observed at the event, genuinely delights users.

That said, unsanctioned app usage leads to risks, so it's best to get ahead of the curve. And now that Canva is expanding into data, AI, and even light app development, there are real needs developing with respect to compliance, DLP, security, identity, and more. If Canva is in use in your organization, make sure you factor it into those strategies.

Gabe Knuth is the senior end-user computing analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia.

Enterprise Strategy Group is part of Omdia. Its analysts have business relationships with technology vendors.