Mind the gap please: according to new research from the Ponemon Institute, the gap between organisations’ ideal DevOps and microservices capabilities and what they are actually able to deliver is costing enterprises on average $34 million per year.

The study, which was sponsored by hybrid cloud management provider Embotics and which polled more than 600 cloud management professionals, found three quarters (74%) said DevOps enablement capabilities were either ‘essential’, ‘very important’, or ‘important’ to their organisations. Four in five (80%) said microservices were essential to important. Yet only a third said their company had the ability to push through those capabilities.

Ultimately, the root of the problem is how organisations are managing – and struggling – to cope with how employees are consuming cloud resources. Almost half (46%) of those polled said their company was ‘cloud direct’ – employees bypassing IT to communicate directly to AWS, Azure et al through native APIs or their own public cloud accounts.

This leads to issues with regards to visibility and management. 70% of respondents said they have no visibility at all into the purpose or ownership of the VMs in their cloud environment, while a similar number (66%) said they were ‘constantly challenged’ with management and tracking of assets in their cloud ecosystem.

The solution? DevOps, DevOps, DevOps, as a former Microsoft chief executive might have put it. The report puts this under the banner of CMP (Cloud Management Platform) 2.0 – a new era of hybrid cloud management. Almost three quarters (71%) of those polled say they have adopted or are planning to adopt DevOps methodologies, with the majority saying it will improve project quality (69%), delivery scheduling (61%), and budgeting (60%).

This is by no means the only study in recent weeks which has come to this conclusion. According to Puppet’s most recent note, issued earlier this month, there was not only a clear difference between high and low performers but a significant gap between lower performers depending on industry.

“To enable true digital business process transformation, enterprises need to find a way to bridge the gap between the speed and agility developers need and the control and governance required by the IT organisation,” said Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute in a statement. “The report shows that this isn’t happening with current cloud management strategies.”

You can read the full report here (email required).