One of the biggest challenge for enterprise IT teams have been monitoring the public cloud, along with the network and applications. Most of the tools designed to carter this issue has been failing to deliver in-depth visibility, either from cloud providers or specialized point solutions, IT teams are required to manage performance from end-to-end. While people have been adopting public cloud options more frequently, blind spots in the environment can be incredibly costly.

Fortunately, there are new technologies and approaches in the market that can save us from these cloud visibility issues with more control over the environment, and impact the overall business. Below are the four key areas that offer deep insight into the cloud network, making a significant difference:

Cloud Migrations

Many organizations have been moving their on-premise applications to the cloud, and more will continue to make this shift the upcoming years. However, migration can be deeply affected by your company’s needs and objectives. Unfortunately, the level of network and architecture visibility required by the architects and engineers to make this shift is still a struggle.

Most of the time, the organizations migrating towards the cloud lack the understanding of pre- and post-migration key performance indicators (KPIs). Moreover, they cannot accurately measure historical baselines and changes with time. Whether you have decided to migrate limited chunks of your data, such as few servers, or databases, or even an entire application stack, to ensure a smooth transition, you need to maintain complete visibility. To have transparency, you need end-to-end insight into public cloud network, and visibility into virtual private cloud (VPC) traffic and the services running through them.

Say that you decide to migrate your application from your on-premise server to the cloud. In this scenario, you need to have a better understanding of your application’s current state before you change anything, and ensure that everything works smoothly once the migration is complete. This can be done with application and service visibility to measure bandwidth usage and performance before migration, and topologies display to identify application paths for an effective migration plan. Once the transition is complete, you need to check bandwidth and performance levels post-transition and measure current performance against the previous records.

Cost and Consumption

With almost 61% of organizations planning to move towards the cloud, it’s no wonder that they face surprise costs. According to the Flexera report, 82% of organizations find managing cloud spend as their top challenge, and almost 23% are over budget on cloud spend.

The root cause of such a problem is the inability to slice the network traffic for deep analysis. Network engineers need to analyze traffic data from various perspectives to conduct cost and consumption analysis. Moreover, in-depth knowledge across their public cloud workloads (AWS or Azure), as they have for on-premise servers, also plays a vital part.

With all the info available to you, IT teams would easily measure the performance and resource utilization of cloud applications and services over time to ensure learning and optimization. It would also help you understand the incoming traffic on your application and any changes to it. This is a valuable insight into the applications impacted by traffic, along with the impacted regions and zones. With the evaluated traffic patterns and trends, as the traffic increases, your IT team could map it back to a source for better analysis.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting Hybrid Systems

Using hybrid IT environments, or a mix of on-premise and cloud servers now is the new normal for people. The majority of the enterprises now hold chunks of their IT workloads in the cloud today. With cloud services, there are several Benefits of Network Security, but you cannot shift to it without understanding the drawbacks. The blind spots in the cloud environment can hinder your ability to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize the hybrid IT environment.

Most of the IT teams don’t have the level of visibility they require to map end-to-end paths for the applications shifting from on-premise servers to cloud infrastructure, vice versa. To handle this problem, IT needs a hop-by-hop analysis for end-to-end path tracing, KPI analysis such as jitter, loss, latency, and more, and historical playback for forensic analysis. Having so much visibility can improve IT productivity and enhance end-user experiences by prioritizing issues more effectively and focusing on troubleshooting of the right workloads, on-premise as well as a cloud network.

Security Analysis

Organizations are dedicated to ensuring top-notch security services with every new cloud initiative and release. Collecting information for deep security analysis, incident response, and troubleshooting can be challenging.

To overcome these obstacles, you need to have clear and complete visibility into your traffic for the network as well as the cloud. If your engineers fail to locate the source of the traffic and its destination between their VPCs, or whether the traffic was accepted or rejected, how can you expect them to conduct a security check and incident response?

Complete visibility, from the network to the cloud, can offer IT teams access to the in-depth level of analytics for their cloud networks as much as they already have for their core network. This involves complete visibility into cloud Network Security Devices, sites, and applications; topology filtering; mapping traffic to its source; searching by IP, service, port, and other options to understand the traffic source; and more. With the information, your network engineers and architectures can conduct better security analysis and carry out incident repost work.

While the public cloud adoption is on the rise, so are the challenges and blind spots that can hinder IT operations of your organization while costing you badly. According to Gartner, by the end of 2021, less than 15% of enterprises would implement monitoring solutions, putting $225-billion investments into cloud-based solutions at risk. Having your IT teams work to achieve centralized visibility is essential for cloud migrations, cost and consumption analysis, improved monitoring and troubleshooting, and to assist security analysis and incident response.