The Added Complexity of Cloud Visibility

Today’s growing trend toward cloud adoption - whether it be a multi-cloud strategy using different cloud providers, or a hybrid-cloud one relying on public and private clouds - has opened the door to tremendous transformational opportunities. It has also added significant complexity and challenges for IT. For example, widespread cloud migration has led to new application architectures, such as micro-services, as well as self-aware, self-healing, self-scaling and self-optimizing software-defined infrastructure that supports these services. This added complexity is stretching IT professionals to find ways to effectively monitor and secure services across these environments successfully.

Cloud Management Challenges

According to the RightScale 2018 State of the Cloud Report, 71 percent of respondents found governance and control to be a challenge, with many IT organizations lacking the visibility needed to manage cloud environments.

Hybrid and multi-cloud environments raise the greatest hurdles when it comes to detecting when and how security breaches or service failures will occur and then what steps need to be taken to resolve issues before end-users will be adversely affected. What is required is visibility without borders - gaining a complete in-depth view into the entire hybrid-cloud environment and all its respective interdependencies.

Achieving Cloud Visibility

Visibility without borders boils down to seeing across all service layers, including applications, infrastructure and their respective dependencies. Since every application transaction is communicated across the virtual or physical network, wire data or traffic flows, is the best source of information required to achieve visibility. In short, IT needs continuous end-to-end cloud monitoring, and in-depth analysis of the traffic flows over the network in order to achieve holistic visibility across applications and the entire service delivery infrastructure. The key to cloud visibility is extracting, collecting, organizing and analyzing pertinent information from the wire data that is exchanged between application workloads in the form of East-West and North-South traffic flows that span private cloud, public cloud, and the datacenter. This traffic-based data can then be leveraged to create smart data that is generated at the collection point. The resulting smart data, which is gathered in real-time provides enterprises with actionable intelligence that enables IT to identify issues, optimize infrastructure and application performance, and discover threats and vulnerabilities in line with demand.

Analyzing the smart data to extract key metrics, and then disseminating this vital information along with service inter-dependencies through dashboards, alerts, and workflows empowers IT to better understand applications and service availability, reliability and responsiveness. Visibility without borders enables IT to cut through the complexity of a cloud environment and troubleshoot issues in real-time, mitigating potential network, security and compliance risks.

By harnessing the insights of smart data, organizations can retain visibility and control over their hybrid- and multi-cloud environments and leverage with confidence the strategic value of flexibility, agility, and scalability needed to remain competitive in today’s highly connected world. A smart data approach offers a detailed picture of the applications and services, and their respective dependencies, giving IT organizations the visibility they need to ensure success.

For more insights check out the NETSCOUT cloud resource center.