Is it too much to ask for when I ask the IT department to give my development team an environment where we can use whatever software that we can download without having to have security check those tools?

Of course, the software can be checked by security before deploying to Test, and the development environment can be on a VLAN that is not accessible from outside. This would greatly aid us by allowing us to use whatever open-source testing tools that we want.

I'm asking because we have such tight restrictions on the software approval process, and I hear of other teams that have an environment where they can configure their local server however they want and they can use whatever tools they want. What's the norm out there?

Thank you for any comments!