I see this in my firm. Non-IT management loves to resort to the lowest denominator of 'systems', that is - systems built by people who are not trained as administrators nor experienced, but mainly follow online guides /and deliver/ (at p50). When I mention the resilience of the systems we maintain to senior directors the most common reply is that 1. the activities are not production and 2. the cost of letting our proper IT-departments handle things go way beyond the willingness to pay. When I reply that our non-production activities are still unmissable for anything more than a few days (which defines it as production for me, but not in our IT-risk landscape) I usually get greeted with something along the lines that in all things cloud all is different. For non-techies I think it's just hard to phantom that most of the effort in maintaining systems is in resilience, not in the just scripting it to work repeatedly.
They most likely resorted to skipping IT involvement because the department is difficult to work with.
"The cloud" is both a technical solution for flexible workload requirements, and a political solution to allow others to continue delivering when IT is quoting them 3 months of "prep work" for setting up a dev environment and 2 to 4 weeks for a single SSL certificate.
As a consultant, I am confronted to hostile IT requirements daily. Oftentimes, departments hiring us end up setting and training their own Ops teams outside of IT. despite leading to incredible redundancy, that's often credited as a huge success for that department, because of the gained flexibility.
So many people somehow believe a single VM with no disk snapshot/ back-up, having a floating IP, running ad hoc scripts to bring up production workload is "production quality", only because it is running in cloud.
