About half of the cloud-based infrastructure services sold these days are purchased by business users outside the IT department, and when it comes to software as a service, those non-IT rogues are making five times as many purchasing decisions as the IT pros, analysts maintain. To get IT back into the loop where it belongs, consider five pieces of advice outlined by CIO magazine's Kevin Fogarty.

One of the main motives for business units to buy cloud services directly and covertly is that it's faster and easier than going through the IT department, according to a recent report by the consulting firm Avanade. The first step to take, therefore, is to speed things up. You can streamline the procurement process, offer checklists and provide comparison tables to give business units a way of evaluating vendors. Hands-off rental services can also be an alluring offer to units that have temporary, but intense, IT needs.

Some direct cloud services purchases are probably inevitable, but the IT department doesn't have to be relegated to the role of bad guy in this arrangement. IT shouldn't have to be the one to enforce negative policy requirements, like usage quotas, while the service provider just revels in the glory of delivering cool apps. Take some of that glory by creating an app store interface or automating dynamic provisioning.

Giving users an app store interface generates the kind of quick and easy buying experience users are looking for in bypassing IT in the first place. It also can make it easier for IT to charge for services and show the technology's value. The chargeback system may not be entirely welcome by the business units, however. If the IT department's charges are much higher than a cloud service providers' charges, users may feel justified in skipping IT's offer.

"A lot of clients I've seen charge back rates for storage, for example, that just don't mesh with what you see outside," said Galen Schreck, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research (NASDAQ: FORR). "If I'm a developer trying to set up a pilot project and I put in a request and get a chargeback price quote that's completely out of whack, it's going to be very tempting to go outside."

For more:
- see Kevin Fogarty's article at CIO

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