Sydney, Australia, 7 May, 2012 – One in five Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) executives are willing to ignore the IT department and consume unapproved public cloud applications according to IDC research.

The recently-released report, Testing ANZ Employee Willingness to Bypass IT on the Way to the Cloud, shows that in addition to executives, almost 20% of mobile and remote workers would also ignore IT policy and procure services from a public cloud provider.

The report (available on http://www.idc.com) introduces the results of IDC's Next Generation Workspace Ecosystem surveys which investigated the views, expectations and intentions of both CIOs and enterprise employees on the use of ICT in the workplace.

The research found that whilst the move to public cloud services is not the major workspace driver at the moment - this mantle is taken by desktop/notebook refreshes, operating system upgrades and mobility-related projects - there is little doubt that most organisations will move some applications in the cloud in future with email, office productivity, social and collaborative apps the first off the rank.

"ANZ CIOs and IT decision makers are willing to adopt public cloud services in the next three years, but it is not the main driver in current workspace strategies, and over 15% see a threat from the use of non-approved public cloud services" says IDC research manager, Trevor Clarke.

The vertical industry employees most likely to bypass IT on the way to the cloud come from the education sector with distribution and services, and BFSI not far behind. In terms of organisation size there is little difference between small and large organisations.

"It was also notable that 31 to 35 year olds and 41 to 45 years olds showed most willingness to ignore any IT policies around the usage of public cloud services," Clarke said. "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."

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The report, 'Testing ANZ Employee Willingness to Bypass IT on the Way to the Cloud' delivers a comprehensive analysis of the assumption that employees are willing to procure cloud services without the approval of the IT department in the ANZ market via the results of two related IDC surveys: The ANZ Next-Generation Workspace Ecosystem CIO and IT Decision Maker Survey and the ANZ Enterprise Employee Survey.

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