Public cloud adoption is exploding, but a new industry survey reveals that many are struggling to see an immediate return on their investments due to a lack of visibility, monitoring and infrastructure control in their environments.

ScienceLogic, Inc.‘s Trends in Global Cloud Adoption survey of more than 1,600 IT pros found that a massive 83 percent of organizations intend to expand their public cloud operations, and of those, 62 percent are already in the process of shifting their workloads to the new environment. The survey also showed how the public cloud has already made inroads into the enterprise, with the majority of respondents saying at least 25 percent of their IT resources are hosted on public clouds. In addition, 20 percent of respondents said that half of their infrastructure already resides in the public cloud.

As far as the public cloud vendors go, Amazon Web Services was cited as the platform of choice for 58 percent of respondents, followed by Microsoft Azure (43 percent) and the Google Cloud Platform (13 percent).

All well and good adoption-wise, but problems loom when it comes to visibility, or rather the lack of it, in public cloud infrastructure. ScienceLogic’s survey found that a whopping 82 percent of enterprises are “unable to ensure optimum performance, health and availability of public cloud workloads due to a lack of visibility into the public cloud infrastructure.”

We should note that ScienceLogic’s main service offering is to provide said visibility into public clouds with its comprehensive monitoring services for AWS, Azure and other vendors, but the company tries its best to convince us that this is a valid concern nonetheless. According to them, almost half of respondents do not know how to “proactively” monitor workloads running on public clouds, and two-thirds said they have less control of their cloud-based IT infrastructure compared to their on-premise architecture.

ScienceLogic says this is one of the biggest reasons why hybrid setups are so common, because enterprises prefer to keep mission-critical workloads such as transaction processing on-premise where they can exert greater control.

Although the survey is undoubtedly intended to promote ScienceLogic’s own services, it’s hard to dismiss its claims that lack of visibility is a non-issue. After all, the startup has attracted $84 million in venture funding over four rounds, it’s latest and largest being a $43 million cash injection led by Goldman Sachs and Intel Capital in February 2015.