A large majority of enterprises said they’re not getting enough benefits from their move to the cloud, according to a new survey from cloud infrastructure management company Fugue Inc.

The organizations pointed to a range of factors, including compliance and security concerns and unexpected downstream costs, adding up to their contention that the cloud is failing to live up to their expectations.

According to the survey, just one in five companies said they’re getting “the most” out of the cloud, compared with a whopping 80 percent that felt they’re failing to do so. Thirty-nine percent indicated that security and compliance were the main reasons for this failure, while 36 percent said executives fail to understand the complex nature of the cloud. In addition, 22 percent of respondents felt there was a “lack of cohesion” between cloud and data center teams.

Companies are also struggling to get a lid on some of the main challenges of operating cloud infrastructure. Controlling costs remains the biggest challenge, cited by 48 percent of respondents, closely followed by the need to ensure infrastructure security and compliance (44 percent), manage increased cloud complexity (42 percent) and meet executive demands around business agility (36 percent).

“The promises of the cloud are tremendous, but they are hard-won,” said Josh Stella, Fugue’s co-founder and chief executive. “You hear you’ll get rid of data centers, save money and move faster; cloud’s essentially an infinite resource. But what happens is that IT departments lose control of it—they can’t keep track of everything that’s running, and there are security and compliance complications.”

Many companies have turned to specialized cloud infrastructure management tools in order to overcome some of these problems, but Fugue said that this is only creating more headaches because of the vast number of tools available. Indeed, the survey showed that businesses are relying on an unwieldy number of such tools: Some 38 percent are using between three and five tools, while 31 percent use between six and ten and the rest said they’re using even more than that.

With all of these problems surfacing, an overwhelming 96 percent of businesses agreed that the cloud “needs a makeover” to make it more user-friendly.

Specifically, a third of companies said the cloud needs to be simplified and easier to use, while 29 percent said it needs to be easier to keep cloud-based data secure. Thirteen percent said they wished it was easier to control cloud-related costs, while 10 percent said the cloud itself needs to be easier to control.

One final tidbit from the study showed that 87 percent of companies have experienced a cloud outage at some point. In response, 47 percent of firms have added multicloud capabilities to protect against this happening again, while 41 percent built more resilient application architectures, and 38 percent added multiregion capabilities.

Not all companies showed such initiative, however, with 24 percent of firms simply choosing to blame someone else for outages and 19 percent simply resorted to “prayer” to prevent it happening again. Good luck with that.

Image: George Thomas/Flickr