You don't own the system you are on, the company does. Their property, their rules. You should not be doing personal business at work. I hate to tell you, but they pay you to do your job not personal business.

They are selling their point of sales machines to Toshiba. They want to become software and service only.

They are already doing this internally. 99% of the time when I contact one of their support techs I get someone who I can barely understand over in India or Brazil.

The issue I have with "Cloud" computing, besides it becoming the latest buzz word and craze, is the security concerns. To my knowledge none of the cloud services comply with any of the security regulations. With that said how many small organizations are using google for email or documents that contain medical information or other regulated items that have strict policies on how personal information is handled?

I have read a few articles by Galen Gruman, the idiot that wrote this. He calls himself a "smart user". I personally think he is a short sighted idiot. He wants users to be allowed to put anything, application or equipment, on a companies network. That is just plan wrong. So many problems can occur from doing this that will cause a so-called "smart user" to lose their job not to mention the likely hood that someone in IT will lose theirs also for not enforcing company policy. If something will make the job so much easier, what is the harm in doing some work with putting a proposal together and sending it through the pipeline. Personally I never got made at someone for trying to make work easier if they did it properly. But there is a limit on resources and just because it makes one persons job easier does not mean that IT will support it. But if it makes 10+ peoples job easier the likelihood of it being tested and approved is better. Remember the company wants a good ROI.

I hate to disagree, but I have to. IT policy is a law that must be followed. What the problem here is the people creating the law sees only the end goal and not the road that needs to be traveled. Talk to them and show them what is required of you during the research. Tell them that other ways need to be looked at in achieving the goal before this is implemented. More harm is done and time lost by people trying to circumvent the policies then it is by sitting down with them and stating the procedures that are done and stating why a different method is needed.