Enterprises should get their houses in order before attempting to move their most critical applications to the cloud, concludes a new study.

So-called hybrid cloud strategies, which is a term used to describe moving some workloads to the public cloud while keeping others in-house, are growing in popularity among enterprises. But a new cloud migration survey conducted by Forrester Research Inc. on behalf of cloud management specialist CloudHealth Technologies Inc. warns that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

Some of the problems identified in migrating to the cloud include “cost complexity,” as well as a failure to train stakeholders such as DevOps teams that combine developers and information technology operations staff, the study found.

According to Forrester, fewer than 40 percent of the companies it surveyed were able to meet or exceed their targets for controlling costs and migrating to the cloud. In fact, 58 percent of companies said the costs of running IT infrastructure in the cloud were higher than they estimated. As such, less than half of the companies described their most recent public cloud migration as a success, with most underestimating the costs of transitioning and the unpredictability of the pay-as-you-go pricing models that many public cloud providers operate.

“Most firms today underestimate costs associated with cloud usage and migration,” Forrester said in a statement issued Thursday.

A majority of respondents admitted to Forrester that they were unprepared to handle the technical requirements that are an integral part of any transfer to cloud services. The survey found there was a “skills gap” in many organizations, and that those companies had problems with training IT staff during and after migrating.

Even once the migration was completed, a number of organizations “took a productivity hit, underestimating developer hours required for app redesign and time spent on staff retraining.” One of the main reasons for that is fewer than a quarter of the companies surveyed actually thought to include their DevOps and security teams in the process.

“Firms must collaborate across all stakeholders in order to properly realign processes and skills to support cloud usage,” Forrester concluded. “The successful organizations are the ones that take the time to plan, evaluate their options and adopt continuous-learning feedback processes.”

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