There is growing dissatisfaction over cloud computing, according to Gartner, and much of this can be put down to unrealistic expectations or customers simply not implementing the tech properly.

The consultancy claims that cloud dissatisfaction is real, and estimates that as much as a quarter of organisations will experience significant disappointment over the next few years.

What are the causes of this growing feeling of antipathy towards cloud services once billed as the best way forward for corporate IT?

“As cloud adoption continues to grow, many organisations are experiencing cloud dissatisfaction, but it isn’t as widespread as some may think, and is frequently related to factors within the organisation’s control,” – that’s the view of Gartner advisory director Joe Rogus.

He says that unexpected costs, vendor lock-in concerns, and management complexity challenges are all contributing factors toward cloud dissatisfaction, yet there is a direct correlation with improper execution of “upfront strategic activities” in many cases.

“Many organisations lack a cloud strategy altogether, or haven’t planned activities that follow a strategy like optimising cloud spend and instituting good governance. Therefore, organisations must temper their expectations and adopt a pragmatic approach to workload placement,” Rogus advised.

This is all a far cry from the days when the cloud – and public clouds in particular – were portrayed as a no-brainer for organisations wanting to cut their costs or simplify their IT provisioning. However moving to the cloud was never going to be cheaper and has some of the same pitfalls as traditional on-premises IT.

Some countries, including the UK, went as far as to implement a “cloud-first” strategy for public sector procurement, forcing government bodies to operate services in the cloud unless there was a compelling reason not to do so.

Some of the shine has since came off that model: a leaked UK government document last year confirmed the policy had led to IT provisioning ending up into the hands of a small number of large US corporations, which “risk concentration and vendor lock-in that inhibit UK government’s negotiating power over the cloud vendors.”

Many companies have also found that the cost of using public cloud resources can easily get out of control, until it eclipses the expense of procuring and managing their own infrastructure to run applications.

One example some may be familiar with is 37Signals, operator of the Basecamp project management tool, which is now in the final stretch of migrating back on-premises after being stung with a $3.2 million bill for cloud services by AWS a couple of years back.

Situations such as this can be the result of over-provisioning resources, or a lack of visibility into exactly what resources a customer is using. A study by CAST AI last year of Kubernetes deployments found that just 13 percent of provisioned CPUs and 20 percent of memory was typically being utilised.

Some customers also perhaps expect to be able to simply lift-and-shift workloads from on-premises to the cloud. In reality it will likely require some refactoring or rebuilding.

“Implementation plans must be created that not only address the ‘what’ and the ‘how,’ but also the ‘why’ around cloud adoption,” Rogus said. “Cloud dissatisfaction can largely be avoided through proper planning.”

Gartner says many organisations that have adopted a multi-cloud architecture find connecting to and between providers a challenge, and more than 50 percent of businesses will not get the expected results from their multi-cloud implementations.

This was one of the findings of Britain’s competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which said (among other things) that technical barriers make it difficult to operate a multi-cloud strategy – a claim hotly denied by the big cloud companies.

However, a trend Gartner identifies is a growth in industry-specific cloud platforms, with more vendors offering services that address particular industry verticals.

Another is demand for digital sovereignty, as organisations are called on to protect data, infrastructure and critical workloads from control by external jurisdictions and foreign government access. Gartner forecasts that half of multinational orgs will have digital sovereign strategies by 2029, while less than 10 percent do so today.

As was reported recently, experts claim that ditching the US cloud giants is next to impossible for European biz users, and Rogus agreed: “most regional cloud providers are not on par with global hyperscalers in both execution and vision. Therefore, completely eliminating dependency on global cloud hyperscalers without losing significant functionalities is, at present, nearly impossible.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gartner also forecasts demand for AI/ML in the cloud is set to surge. It believes half of cloud compute resources will be devoted to AI workloads by 2029.

This could end up being very pricey indeed, whether tech customers get the strategy right or wrong.