Many IT decision makers feel they are more likely to have a close encounter with a flying saucer than see the completion of their company’s cloud migration in the next six months.

This was one of a number of alarming findings contained within Cisco’s 2012 Global Cloud Networking survey this week.

The company polled 1300 IT decision makers in 13 countries spanning five continents, and revealed a lack of universal confidence in the cloud among IT professionals unless a proper cloud migration strategy is adopted.

The survey included a series of irreverent comparisons designed to put “cloud deployments in perspective”, with 31% of the experts surveyed stating that they could train for a marathon or grow a mullet in less time than it would take to migrate their business fully to the cloud.

Nearly a quarter of those polled stated they would in the next six months be …