Despite the explosive growth of the public cloud, there are still major gaps surrounding public cloud adoption and understanding, according to ScienceLogic's Trends in Global Cloud Adoption survey of 1,600 IT professionals.

The company surveyed over to uncover public cloud adoption trends and understand how traditional IT infrastructure is changing.

Public cloud adoption is expected to continue to grow at a rapid pace, though concerns and lack of understanding still prevent adoption in some organizations.

■ 62 percent of participants are already using at least one public cloud.

■ 83 percent of organizations expect public cloud spend to increase in the next 12 months.

■ Of the the organizations choosing not to leverage public cloud architectures, about half cite unclear benefits and lack of knowledge. The rest blame security and privacy concerns, lack of business need, or simply don’t know why.

Organizations lack advanced visibility, monitoring and infrastructure control in their public cloud environments.

■ A staggering 82 percent are unable to ensure optimum performance, health and availability of public cloud workloads due to lack of advanced visibility into the public cloud infrastructure.

■ 46 percent of participants acknowledge that they do not, or don’t know how, to proactively monitor their public cloud workloads.

■ Over 75 percent admit that shadow IT and cloud sprawl is happening within their organizations, whether IT teams like it or not.

■ 65 percent feel that IT has less control over the infrastructure in their public cloud environments.

Cloud challenges dramatically impact the bottom line for many organizations.

■ On average, organizations lose about $3.9 million, or about $12,200 per minute, annually due to network outages.

■ 50 percent of organizations have experienced at least one complete network outage in the past 12 months. Of those, 27 percent experienced over two hours of down time per event.

■ Network failures are the source of the majority of reported outages, with 26 percent citing network device failures, 24 percent citing circuit failures and 18 percent citing network configuration errors.

“These results illustrate that cloud adoption isn’t just a technology fad,” said Dave Link, ScienceLogic CEO. “As hybrid IT and multi-cloud usage becomes mainstream for organizations, so does the need to simplify workload visibility and management for IT teams. Without this deep visibility of dependencies, organizations risk losing millions per year due to network outages that could have been prevented or shortened with the use of monitoring tools.”