Corporate information-technology workers are mad.

Laws governing how employees use technology have gotten increasingly strict, as lawmakers try to keep companies from spilling private information about their employees and customers. Meanwhile, employees themselves have become increasingly creative at finding ways to break the IT rules -- and that is putting IT departments in a bind.

Many office workers are circumventing their IT departments by bringing nonapproved technology into the workplace, sending giant files using Web-based services, sneaking forbidden software onto their personal computers, accessing work email on their handheld devices and so on. (The Wall Street Journal recently detailed some of these workarounds in a story titled "Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You," which generated many angry responses from IT workers.)

"The typical user treats their computer at work like their computer at home," said Robert Lamm, president of computer-services company Lamm Technical Resources LLC in Sedalia, Mo. "The difference is that when the computer at work encounters a service issue like a virus, malware infection or running out of disk space, the company -- not the user -- pays for the repair."

In the end, IT workers said they get blamed both by employees who feel too restricted and by company executives who, when things go wrong, fume that policies must not have been restrictive enough.