The network issues associated with private or public cloud deployments are so great IT professionals would rather have serious dental surgery than deal with them.
So claims research released at the Interop conference in Las Vegas this week, which showed more than a third (39 per cent) of respondents would rather undergo a root canal treatment than face solving cloud deployment networking difficulties.
The majority of respondents cited a cloud-ready network (37 per cent) as the biggest infrastructure element required for further cloud deployments, ahead of a virtualised data centre (28 per cent) or a service-level agreement from a cloud service provider (21 per cent).
The same survey, carried out by Cisco, found that nearly three quarters (73 per cent) feel they are confident they have enough information to begin their private or public cloud deployments. However, the remainder (27 per cent) felt they had more knowledge about how to play Angry Birds than the steps needed to migrate their company's network and applications to the cloud.
Cisco said that many IT organisations are still considering and planning cloud migrations with nearly a quarter of IT decision makers saying that they were "more likely to see a UFO, a unicorn or a ghost" before they see their company's cloud migration started and completed.
During the cloud migration process, data protection security (72 per cent) was cited as the top network challenge responsible for preventing successful implementation of cloud services, followed by availability and reliability of cloud applications (67 per cent), device-based security (66 per cent), visibility and control of applications across the WAN (60 per cent) and overall application performance (60 per cent).
When asked to anticipate the length of time the transfer of applications such as web conferencing, storage and email would take to migrate to either private or public clouds, most respondents suggested a private cloud migration to take longer than a public one.
In addition, when asked to estimate the average length of time it would take to complete the cloud migration for their applications, most IT professionals indicated the deployment would take less than six months.
Praveen Akkiraju, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's services routing tTechnology group said that as cloud adoption increases at a rapid rate, businesses "need to be fully aware of the necessary steps when planning for a cloud model that is right for their organisation."
Akkiriaju added that the survey offered valuable insight into what organisations are experiencing in their cloud migrations, and "provides a real-world analysis to help businesses better understand the challenges related getting their networks ready for cloud services."
