CloudCheckr says that the overwhelming majority of AWS subscribers have failed to address at least one major configuration issue in their deployment. The cloud management solutions firm reached this conclusion after conducting a survey that compared assessments of 400 client accounts with over 125 internally used best practices.

According to the study, 98 percent of Amazon cloud users are coping with a serious cost, availability and/or security exception. CloudCheckr says that 96 percent of the participants in the survey are paying more than they should for their environment, 98 percent have experienced problems maintaining uptime, and 44 percent left their data vulnerable.

In the cost category, underutilized EC2 instances represent the most frequently occurring exception at 84 percent.   Nearly 60 percent of users have excess Elastic IP, 36 percent are renting EC2 instances that they’re not using, and 17 percent chose a pricing plan that doesn’t meet all of their organization’s needs.

According to the company, the number one availability exception is that 91 percent of users don’t bother to maintain up-to-date snapshots of their EBS volumes.  Well over half don’t utilize auto scaling groups for EC2, and 34 percent don’t deploy their instances across multiple availability zones.

Last but not least is security – the most wide-spread problem here is that 34 percent of EC2 instances give every user access to broad IP ranges. The second, third, and fourth most frequent exceptions are universal S3 “Upload/Delete,” “View Permissions” and “Edit Permissions” authorizations.

CloudCheckr blames the abundance of cost, availability and security issues on the complexity of Amazon Web Services. Competitors such as Rackspace are exploiting this Achilles’ heel to make attractive offers  to enterprises that prioritize cost efficiency and ease-of-use.

See the full infographic below.