By Anne Widjaja
One in five Australian and New Zealand executives are willing to ignore IT department policies and consume unapproved apps in the cloud, according to IDC research.
The IDC report, ‘Testing ANZ Employee Willingness to Bypass IT on the Way to the Cloud’, revealed that along with executives, almost 20 per cent of mobile and remote workers are also inclined to ignore IT policies.
IDC research manager, Trevor Clarke, said that workers aged between 31-35 and 41-45 were the most likely to ignore IT policies around using public cloud services.
“These results show that CIOs and IT decision-makers need to quickly win over key stakeholders, such as executives, to ensure they retain relevance and influence on the kind of technologies that are used in their organisation,” Clarke warned.
Vertical industry employees were found to be the most likely group to bypass IT policy, closely followed by the education sector, distribution and services, and banking, financial services and insurance industries.
IT departments can take comfort in the report’s findings that moving to public cloud services is not yet a major workspace driver. Desktop/notebook and operating systems upgrades, as well as mobility related projects, still dominate the workspace. However, according to IDC, there is little doubt that in future, organisations will be increasingly moving applications to the cloud, with email, office productivity, social and collaborative apps likely to move first.
On cloud adoption in the workplace, Clarke said, “ANZ CIOs and IT decision-makers are willing to adopt public cloud services in the next three years”. However, presently cloud services are “not the main driver in current workspace strategies, and over 15 per cent see a threat from the use of non-approved public cloud services”.
This report is an introduction to the IDC’s ‘Next Generation Workspace Ecosystem surveys’, which investigates the intentions of CIOs and enterprise employees on the use of ICT in the workplace.
The full report ‘Testing ANZ Employee Willingness to Bypass IT on the Way to the Cloud’ can be accessed here: http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=AU1123706U
