Enterprise cloud users and even cloud providers themselves are being harmed by a lack of transparency in the industry, say analysts from Forrester Research Inc. in a new report.

In a recent survey of 275 IT leaders about cloud vendors’ transparency and the metadata they provide, Forrester found that 60 percent of companies believe a lack of operational, compliance information, and support is preventing them from using the cloud more. Even worse, 100 percent of the IT leaders surveyed experienced negative impacts from their cloud operations, such as lack of information, including outages, wasted resources, unexpected costs and difficulty reporting to management.

It gets even worse too, because fifty percent of respondents went as far to say their cloud provider “does not care” about their company’s success, nor do cloud providers understand their needs.

“A lack of clear cloud usage and operational data results in performance problems, challenges with reporting to management on costs of performance, payment for resources that customers ultimately don’t use, and unexpected bills,” Forrester said in its report.

One of the biggest problems has to do with a lack of usage information. Just over 41 percent of companies said they face challenges related to reporting costs and performance to their management, while 36 percent said they had received unexpected line items or bills as a result of their cloud operations. Even worse, some 39 percent of companies claim to have paid for unused resources, while 43 percent have experienced poor performance or outages. In both cases, this amounts to a major failure on the behalf of cloud providers, who often tout cost efficiency and uptime as two of the biggest advantages over on-premise architecture.

These problems are partly the reason why we’ve see a lot of activity in the cloud monitoring services niche in recent months. Last January, SolarWinds paid $40 million to acquire cloud mentoring company Librato, while in February, hybrid cloud monitoring startup ScienceLogic announced a $43 million funding round. More recently, in April, Cloudyn announced its cloud monitoring and optimization software now supports Microsoft Azure.

Forrester’s report concluded that while legacy IT spend and security remain the biggest barriers to cloud adoption in the enterprise, issues such as support, onboarding, and information sharing are also coming to the fore. As such, Forrester recommends that enterprises insist their cloud providers “communicate clearly” on issues such as compliance, processes and expertise.

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