Is this the trough of disillusionment?

The tantalizing promise of cloud computing to make IT operations, simpler and cheaper may be yielding to the reality of an environment that is more complex and difficult to manage than many respondents had expected, at least according to a new survey by cloud automation vendor Logicworks Corp.

The survey of 400 IT decision-makers found that 80 percent said their leadership underestimates the time and cost required to manage resources in the cloud. Forty-three percent said their own workforce is not yet up to the management task and 78 percent worry that vendor lock-in limits the potential upside of using resources provided by cloud vendors.

Nearly all (96 percent) plan to increase their investment in cloud management over the next five years, with increases averaging 38 percent. Nearly six in 10 said their organizations are fully prepared to address the challenges of managing cloud resources over the next five years, but a substantial 44 percent said they still have some growing to do.

On average, 43 percent of applications and infrastructure are currently automated, but only 16 percent of respondents said they’ve automated more than three-quarters of their infrastructure.

Asked what prevents or organizations from further automating cloud applications or infrastructure, half cited security concerns, 43 percent said cost and 37 percent pointed to lack of expertise. That last point was driven home by the fact that 54 percent said it’s harder to find a good DevOps engineer than a unicorn, which is a mythical creature.

Downtime is a worry. Half of the IT pros said they are only somewhat confident that their organization could immediately address an issue that caused downtime in cloud services. The average time to complete recovery from a downtime incident is seven hours.

Inability to take full advantage of cloud resources is a problem that IT organization should address, the report says. “Worries about vendor lock-in prevent enterprises from using the full range of cloud tools, which means [they] bring their custom, in-house tools to their cloud deployments,” the report notes. As a result, they “struggle to focus skilled engineers on impactful DevOps work rather than on day-to-day maintenance and firefighting.”