I can go one step further, based on what I've seen - "Shadow IT" that has its own help-desk line and ticketing system... Running their own LAN with interconnect

I can go one step further, based on what I've seen - "Shadow IT" that has its own help-desk line and ticketing system... Running their own LAN with interconnects to "main IT". The end result is that nobody ever lets "main IT" near anything. Most people who have important work on the go used shadow IT. People who know what they're doing then run their own personal Shadow IT (but would use the real shadow IT if they had any issues like needing to reinstall a system, as that way it won't get connected to the main IT domain...) You are absolutely correct - it's an absolute nightmare. Many university networks originate from the era of the flat LAN, where every system got a routable public IP, reachable via the internet. There are people running all kinds of servers and services and jobs across the network. None of them are documented, some might be relied upon by important internal or external things... There's no standardisation of hardware generally. If you're lucky there's some managed desktops using standard configurations for computer labs used by students, and office administrative staff. Don't expect to be able to tell professors what they'll use - they're buying computers on their research grants for themselves and their teams. And their own NAS servers and everything. Heck the "shadow IT with a help-desk" was even offering storage and VMs on their shadow infrastructure. I've seen people trying to use Windows XP on the network because some incredibly expensive piece of equipment needs it, and they would like to be able to browse the internet while they wait on it to do its work (!) Fortunately, shadow IT were on the lookout for that, and helped them set up a second computer on a supported OS, and get the XP box offline.