A much more common trend is that internal IT staff find a problem. They need more computing power, or more storage, or some outside analytical tool. Getting approval for this can often be complicated, sometimes for good reasons (i.e. security) sometimes for less good reasons (i.e. inertia and bureaucracy). Faced with a real-world problem to solve, these tech-savvy staff suffer from insufficient resources. So instead, they turn to some of the publicly available resources. The best-known of these is probably Amazon’s Web Services (AWS), but there are many, many more. … Often these expenses can be camouflaged by use of personal credit cards, or expensed as technical manuals. After all, the expense line on the credit card bill just says ‘Amazon’. A few hours of Amazon compute time typically results in two digit bill. See on gigaom.com