Public cloud adoption will continue to go up and up – but as hybrid initiatives go up with them, concerns persist over how to handle cloud migration challenges.

That’s the key finding from the latest study by VIAVI Solutions. The IT and network testing provider, in its most recent State of the Network Global Study, polled more than 600 IT professionals and found more than half (56%) of enterprises polled had made the leap to public cloud as of this year. This number is set to go up to 72% by 2020.

By 2020, more enterprises plan to run a larger percentage of their apps in the cloud. As of this year, 62% of firms polled say only up to a quarter of their apps are cloud-based. By 2020, this number is set to dip to 28%, with 44% saying they have between a quarter and half of their apps in the cloud. More than a quarter (28%) of those polled said they expected at least half of their apps to be cloud-based in two years – a number which is only at 11% today.

Yet while these figures all look impressive, it is akin to the duck analogy – serene on top but paddling like hell underneath. Two thirds (65%) of those polled said their network team was responsible for troubleshooting cloud issues, compared with 24% who said they weren’t.

As VIAVI puts it, this translates as a disconnect between IT and business; if IT are fighting fires post-migration, then the chances are they weren’t around pre-migration, as the move may have been decided by a specific business unit. More than half (52%) said their biggest problem was determining whether problems were caused by the network, the application, or the system – by some distance the most frequently cited issue.

In terms of what needs to be done, the company suggests four key takeaways; adopting a ‘cloud by default’ approach; ensure engineers have as much visibility into the organisation’s SaaS offerings as possible; get visibility for the full application journey, from the user, to the cloud and the data centre, and get remote user intelligence on board.

“Based on this year’s State of the Network, you’ve really got to feel for enterprise IT teams. They’re losing control of infrastructure and services that are migrating to the cloud, while simultaneously supporting employees who may be working anywhere, and yet remain on the hook to maintain performance and resolve issues,” said Douglas Roberts, VIAVI enterprise and cloud business unit VP and GM. “They need solutions to increase their scope of visibility and speed of response, as well as smarter analytics.”