4 Reasons Your Network Team Needs Better Visibility Into Cloud Deployments
Monitoring the public cloud in conjunction with the network and applications can be a major challenge for enterprise IT teams. Most tools designed to address this issue – whether directly from cloud providers or specialized point solutions – fall short of delivering the in-depth visibility IT teams really need to adequately manage performance from end to end. While public cloud adoption continues to rise, blind spots in these environments are highly prevalent and can be incredibly costly.
The good news is that there are new technologies and approaches that can assuage these cloud visibility challenges, offer IT teams more control, and profoundly impact the business overall. Here are four key areas in which granular insight from the network to the cloud can make a significant difference:
Many organizations are migrating on-premises applications to the cloud today, and many more will continue to do so over the next few years. But cloud migrations can vary greatly depending on your company’s needs and objectives. Unfortunately, cloud infrastructure and specialized point solutions can struggle to provide the level of network and application visibility that architects and engineers on both the cloud and network sides need to be successful with these transitions.
In many cases, organizations struggle with cloud migration initiatives due to a lack of understanding when it comes to pre- and post-migration key performance indicators (KPIs) and an inability to accurately measure historical baselines and changes over time. Whether you’re migrating limited portions of your system such as a few specific databases or servers, or an entire application stack or data center, it’s important to gain granular visibility to ensure a smooth transition. To do that, you need end-to-end insight from on-premises environments into the public cloud, and visibility into virtual private clouds (VPC) traffic and the cloud services running through them.
Say, for instance, you’re migrating an application from your core network to the cloud. In this case, you need to have a deep understanding of the application’s current state before doing anything, and you must be able to confirm that everything works as intended post-migration. This requires application and service visibility that measures bandwidth usage and performance baselines pre-deployment (while the application is still on-premises) and displays topologies to identify application paths that can help plan the migration effectively. You then need to validate for bandwidth and performance levels once the transition to the public cloud is complete and conduct ongoing measurement of current performance against historical trends via streamlined reports.
With 61% percent of organizations planning to focus on additional cloud migrations, it’s no secret that many organizations grapple with sticker shock and/or surprise costs. As a matter of fact, a recentFlexera reportshows that managing cloud spend is a top challenge for 82% of organizations and that most are over budget on cloud spend by 23%.
What’s driving this problem? Primarily it’s the inability to slice and dice network traffic for deep analysis from the core network into the cloud. Network and cloud architects and engineers need to be able to view traffic data from a variety of perspectives in order to conduct cost and consumption analysis of applications and services. They also need the same in-depth level of analytics across their public cloud workloads (inAWSandAzure) as they have for on-premises environments.
