General Scability Question for you all

Hello.  I have a strange request… I am not looking for any one answer in
particular, but perhaps your opinion on how to deal with the following
situation… and may be how your company dealt with the following:

The company I work for has grown very rapidly, almost to quick.  We went
from
about 350 employees to over 1500 in 3 years.  During this growth there was
a
need by our business units to track or analyze data, and of course no
budget
to do so.  So they went and created their own MS Access databases with no
input from the IT department.  They have now created over 100 business
critical MS Access applications.  

So now that our company recognizes these applications as being business
critical they want to find the best way to *****s risk to business
operations,
and find the best solution to sup****t these application including file
backups etc.

Have any of you ever dealt with a similar situation?  Are there any third
party tools that are good for version control/backup for instances like
this?
Any input would be very well received.  I appreciate your time… I
already
know how I want to deal with this situation, but nobody listens to me ;)

More background on our situation:

Let’s see, to make things even worse we run a both NOVEL and AD on our
network!  What a darn mess!!!  To say the least our network is not the
most
stable and I frequently encounter corrupted files… and have run across
weird
MS Access issues that I have never seen in my 10 years sup****ting MS
Access.
Oh yeah, we totally live 7 years in the past and mostly use MS Access
2000,
with a few lucky folks having 2003!  So a mixed office environment makes
my
life so much easier too lol.  Think that wraps it up… I’m thinking I
should
just get my resume out there and move on lol.

Thanks!