The cloud is absolutely not a fad. Instead, enterprises are falling over themselves to have public cloud providers reduce the burden of managing their IT, according to the results of a new study by the Uptime Institute this week.

Just over 50 percent of IT professionals and data center operators quizzed in the newly published Uptime Institute 2016 Data Center Industry Survey revealed they expect most of their IT workloads to be shifted to the cloud or colocation facilities, with 70 percent of them saying it would happen by 2020, and 23 percent indicating they expect the transition to happen as early as next year.

“The shift is occurring, and our findings show an industry in a state of flux. We saw the trends lining up beginning with our 2013 survey, noting that enterprise IT teams were not effectively communicating data center cost and performance metrics to their C-level executives,” remarked Matt Stansberry, director of Content and Publications for the Uptime Institute, in a statement.

Back in 2013, only 42 percent of enterprise data center operators indicated they reported cost and performance information to the C-suite, compared to more than 70 percent for third-party providers. According to Stansberry, this is because many enterprise IT teams tend to emulate counterparts at cloud providers.

“The business demand for agility and cost transparency has driven workloads to the public cloud. Our counsel to data center and IT professionals is to become more effective at articulating and showcasing their value to the business,” Stansberry added.

The survey showed that finances are one of the biggest driving forces in pushing enterprises to the cloud. Some 50 percent of respondents reported that their IT budgets over the past five years have either been tightened or remained flat. And just 10 percent said their IT budgets were “significantly higher” than they were five years ago, with the rest reporting only modest increases.

Another benefit from going to the cloud seems to be a smaller server footprint. Some 55 percent of respondents said their server footprints have remained flat or shrunk in the last five years.

The automation of routine operations is often justified as a way to free up DevOps teams to get distributed enterprise applications out the door faster. Emerging production technologies like application containers are helping to speed that process while presenting new challenges to IT operators who must closely monitor a new generation of hyper-scale IT infrastructure.

The study also found that more than half of enterprises moving workloads to colocation facilities were either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their chosen provider. Even so, the Uptime Institute concluded from its survey that IT outsourcing isn’t always the panacea it’s made out to be. Some 40 percent of those polled said they were paying more than expected for colocation services, and around a third said they had experienced outages at their colocation site. Unfortunately, 60 percent of those that did experience outages said that the penalty clauses in their service level agreements were unable to offset the losses incurred by their businesses.

“Enterprise organizations paying a premium for a third party to deliver datacenter capacity should hold service providers to higher standards,” the survey recommended. “There is room for improvement in vetting, negotiating and managing those relationships.”

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