Using a Cloud Service at the Office Without Permission? You’re Not Alone.
June 22, 2012
I don’t usually like to look too deeply into surveys of customers by one company or another, usually because they tend to arrive at some kind of self-serving point. But sometimes there’s some interesting nuggets in them that illustrate something interesting, or confirm something widely suspected but not often quantified.
The case in point is a new survey by the Texas-based cloud computing outfit Rackspace. This is the company that is the subject of constant and recurring speculation that it’s about to be acquired, with similarly constant and recurring insistence by its senior executives that it doesn’t want to be acquired.
Anyway, Rackspace conducted a survey of 500 IT decision makers who happen to work for companies that use cloud computing services. (Again I ask, rhetorically, given all the surveys they seem to be responding to from vendors, trade publications and so on, when do “IT decision makers” ever get the time do their jobs?) Among the findings are the usual bits that naturally lead one to reach positive conclusions on the part of the company who commissioned the survey: Nine out of 10 IT decision makers like cloud computing, and they prefer vendors with strong customer service but higher prices by a ratio of 3 to 1. No shockers there…
But here’s the bit that caught my attention. If you’ve paid any attention to the evolution of cloud computing in the enterprise over the last two years, you probably know that employees of various levels — programmers especially — can sometimes be sneaky about how they use it. Services like Rackspace and Amazon Web Services, many others are so easy to start using, that it’s common for employees to open an account and start using them without getting proper authorization from the boss.
Rackspace’s survey found that nearly half of those in the survey — 43 percent to be exact — said they were aware of these “rogue IT” situations, where employees take it upon themselves to spin up a cloud service without first getting the boss’ permission, or setting up an account through the usual corporate processes.
Often it’s a matter of solving a problem quickly. Corporations have a way of making decisions slowly, and cloud services can be spun up in a matter of minutes with nothing more than a credit card: Indeed 38% of those surveyed said the main reason for “going rogue” is to save time. One in three said what was needed wasn’t available internally or because they wanted to avoid dealing with the IT department altogether. Hard to argue with that.