"We have a little bit of a 'slow down' mentality here," Treadway said. Many enterprises are not adequately evaluating the cloud services on offer in order to make the best decision about vendors, he said.

While there are 30 or more cloud services vendors out there, many enterprises are "fixated on the top level," he said. They tend to look at the management tools and processes layer. But they should make sure they know about important factors of the cloud service such as the storage model, network performance, security of workloads, how the vendor handles isolation of applications, and whether the way the provider breaks out financial charges matches the way the enterprise charges business units.

"If you don't know how the cloud was built, how do you know your application will run correctly on it?" he said.

Some service providers are more transparent than others, he said. For example, companies such as Unisys and Savvis are relatively transparent, while others such as Amazon are more of a challenge to find out details about, he said. "I'm not saying Amazon should change. It's just important to know as much as you can. If there's an application for which not having that knowledge is not critical, feel free to put that application over there," he said.

The final component that Unisys wants to help customers with is managing the various applications that may be running in a variety of environments. Many enterprises may be running a handful of disconnected tools for monitoring and managing services. "It means there's a risk that things will fall through the cracks, either operationally or from a security perspective," he said.