Compuware (CPWR), a company that provides technology performance management solutions, and independent research and consulting firm Research In Action (RIA) have released the results from a global survey of 740 senior IT professionals about cloud computing adoption. In the survey, researchers found 73 percent of businesses believed infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS) providers could be hiding infrastructure or performance issues, despite the fact that these problems could affect a cloud application’s performance.

“Having handed over control to cloud providers, IT departments have lost much of their ability to troubleshoot and fine-tune IT services,” Thomas Mendel, RIA’s managing director, said in a prepared statement. “This doesn’t just make it tricky to optimize performance for end users, but it can also severely affect the bottom line.”

Researchers noted the majority of IT professionals (79 percent) believed typical service-level agreements (SLAs) built around availability were “too simplistic and fail[ed] to address the risks of moving and managing applications into the cloud.” In addition, 63 percent of respondents said they needed more meaningful SLA metrics from CSPs.

Michael Masterson, director of cloud solutions for Compuware’s application performance management (APM) business unit, told Talkin’ Cloud he was surprised that many survey respondents were well-informed about “noisy neighbors,” cloud applications that put large demands on a database, network or server.

“We didn’t really expect that,” Masterson said. “We didn’t expect that level of awareness.”

Masterson added businesses need guarantees on how their CSPs will perform. As more businesses target cloud services, Masterson said these companies should try to get SLA assurances relating to performance and problem resolution.

“Entrusting mission critical business applications that drive revenue and critical business processes requires ultimate trust and accountability in a cloud provider,” Masterson said in a prepared statement.

Other survey findings included:

For the survey, Compuware and RIA interviewed IT professionals from enterprises in the Americas, Asia and Europe last December. The complete survey is available for download here.