A new survey that looked at cloud adoption inside companies found that many business executives in adopting -- and they face few consequences for doing so.

Avanade, a business technology services company that was created by and Accenture about 10 years ago, sponsored the survey. Conducted by Kelton Research, it involved 573 respondents, including C-level executives and business unit leaders.

In the survey, 20% of those responding said they had actually gone around their IT department to provision cloud services.

Of that subset, 61% said it was easier to provision the services themselves, and 50% said it takes too long to go through IT. And while 60% reported that they have corporate policies in place that prohibit such actions, those policies aren't real deterrents.

Tyson Hartman, the CTO of Avanade, said that business units are responding to cloud in much the same way they have responded to other new technologies, which is to move quickly toward adoption.