IT departments must build private clouds for critical applications to provide employees with the benefits of rapid provisioning and pay-as-you-go services, otherwise company units may put their organisation at risk by looking to the public cloud without consulting IT.

That is according to a new Gartner report, entitled 'Hybrid IT: How Internal and External Cloud Services are Transforming IT'. Gartner states that although businesses have adopted public cloud services for non-critical applications, they are still using internal IT functions for core capabilities.

"IT organisations are taking an 'adopt and go' strategy to satisfy internal customer IT consumerisation and democratisation requirements," said Chris Howard, managing VP at Gartner.

"Many IT organisations are adopting public cloud computing for non-critical IT services such as development and test applications, or for turnkey software as a service (SaaS) applications, such as web analytics and CRM that can holistically replace internal applications and enable access for a mobile workforce".

However, employees have grown accustomed to 'IT as a service' and have built business processes and budget plans with cloud computing in mind.

As such, they are demanding self-service, quickly provisioned critical applications from the IT department. CIOs that do not meet this demand may find employees going direct to the public cloud, without considering the security implications.

"Organisations that do not match the request for IT as a service run the risk of internal customers bypassing the IT organisation and consuming IT services from the external cloud, thereby placing the company at a greater risk," said Howard.

"IT organisations realise that they not only need to compete with the public cloud consumption model, but also must as the intermediary between their internal customers and all IT services - whether internal or external".

Oracle technical architect, John Abel, voiced these exact concerns last week at Oracle's Cloud Computing conference in London.

"Project control is becoming increasingly important for CIOs, because now the business thinks that it doesn't need IT and it can go and procure its own IT capabilities," said Abel.

"That's the challenge that IT has with the cloud, because if IT can't give the business that instant capability, they will go and get it from somewhere else".