I know "secops" guys tend to not really understand what's going on, but you can sell it as just a different computer. You could compromise and install whatever handbrake^w security product they like. Bonus points for that computer being separate from the one where you usually browse the interwebs and such.

However, in practice, at least for the kind of compiling I do, AWS EC2 VMs tend not to be faster than my cheap HP Elitebook. Maybe if you can leverage a hefty number of cores, the situation is different. For regular email pushing, the laptop is good enough.