More than 40% of IT decision makers that participated in a recent survey said there were people in their organization using cloud-based services or resources offered by providers other than their own organizations’ IT departments.

Of these, one in three said these customers turned to the Cloud because their own IT department either did not provide a solution they needed or they simply did not want to deal with their organization’s IT department.

These are some of the conclusions of a survey of 500 high-level IT professionals commissioned by Rackspace and conducted by McLaughlin & Associates.

Nearly all (92%) of the participants said when they were choosing a cloud provider, being able to move their data from one provider’s infrastructure to another’s easily was an important consideration.

Rackspace, one of the leading providers of cloud-based infrastructure services, says its cloud is “open”, which means it does not make it difficult for customers to move data between its cloud and elsewhere.

Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said, “A chief benefit for IT decision makers using open-source technology is portability of workloads across vendors and the elimination of vendor lock-in.”

In April, Rackspace launched a series of cloud-based services hosted on infrastructure based on the open-source cloud architecture OpenStack.

Its own engineers and engineers from the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) started the open-source cloud-architecture project. NASA has scaled back its work on OpenStack, while Rackspace has stuck with it.