It sounds like your IT team is a hard one to convince. 🙂
One possibility could be using a SharePoint list and OData filtering.
Here for example, I have this SharePoint list of people names:

I can use the substringof function in the Filter Query input to see if there is a name that contains a part of a name. In the example below, if I search for mar in the first parameter, I will get back Mario Rogers.

It's not as powerful as the fuzzy search in Dataverse, but it might do the job. What do you think?