Working around official IT was certainly a significant factor early on. I'm less convinced it is nearly as big a driver (or a downside depending on your perspective) today.
Working around official IT was certainly a significant factor early on. I'm less convinced it is nearly as big a driver (or a downside depending on your perspective) today.
It depends on organization size, just my anecdotal example, I would say the moment IT department becomes own island (for example: can totally ignore requests, with excuses staff overbooked/we need extra planning/6 months extra meetings. Or even worse - process request,but up to point where it can show for upper management and blame you for wasting resources) - you can go full cloud, at least there it is possible get something working in reasonable time.
Especially considering that outside of startups (where approval would be fast with or without cloud), virtual infrastructure also got its own bureaucratic process.
A lot of people forget that, when server virtualization was still gaining momentum in a lot of circles, it wasn't uncommon at less technically savvy customers--say a regional bank at the time--to be told that it might take 2 months to provision a new server.
I don't think anyone is forgetting that in this thread, as there's dozens of answers mentioning this.
But as an example: It took about 3 months to provision an AWS server in a recent company I consulted for due to their own bureaucracy and ineptitude of the Ops team.
On the other hand, when I needed a few CI servers for a startup I worked at, I just collected them from AppleStore during lunch hour.
Now this above is what people are "forgetting" and don't want to listen to.
For us the problem is every device that gets plugged into our network is disabled by default, IT need to enable the port and they'll only enable it on machines that they've imaged.
But because AWS isn't in the office, it's fine. We could probably use Hetzner or OVH, but then we have to go through procurement which is as much of as hassle as going through IT.
Now there's two dozen posts with the same example repeated.