Businesses adopting the cloud are "suffering from staggering cloud failure rates and multiple unexpected challenges" as "cloud wars" are fought by tech giants.
The conclusion of the study - "Casualties of Cloud Wars: Customers Are Paying the Price" - paints a bleak picture of cloud computing globally as it was carried out across US, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions and probed more than 400 professionals.
Reading between the lines
It's worth noting that the survey, which was carried out by Enterprise Management Associates, was done on behalf of disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) provider Iland and sponsored by VMWare.
Incidentally, the latter's partner network of cloud service providers (including Iland) had the highest success rates across cloud service providers.
Its vCloud saw a mere 33% failure rate, defined as "stalled or unsuccessful (tried but failed) adoption", compared to 44% for Microsoft's Azure, 57% for Amazon Web Services and 63% for Rackspace.
On average, each participant used three cloud vendors and the challenges faced by users tend to vary across territories. Support was the most common in the US with performance and downtime being the dominant ones in EMEA and APAC.
UK cloud customers emerged the worst affected with a whopping 98% having expereinced at least one incident or challenged, marginally higher than the 88% across the survey respondents.
