Hey Pete, 

I certainly feel for you.  Development teams can be really hard to fit into the usual user/workstation IT paradigm.  I was hired by our lead software developer and we work hand in hand to try and bring things to those that need it in a timely manner.  It can still be difficult regardless and the inter-operation between the two departments is an absolute necessity to keeping your business moving forward.  The pace of development in a studio can really make or break it on any number of projects.

That said what we have personally done is started replicating our live system VM's and moving them into the development space so that the dev team can use them as a test platform for whatever they need.  Thus far we have really only needed to do this with databases and a few servers.  The outcome has been extremely positive thus far and the level of communication between the dev team and IT has grown because of it.

If its become an impasse with IT and you really feel that there's no other way around it.  Then I think its probably time to sit down with both IT and management and bang out a solution that works for both of you.

Best of luck!

Cheers,

Todd Smith