As businesses progress on their journeys towards cloud maturity, one of the biggest obstacles is a failure to meet cloud visibility requirements in the public cloud. A lack of visibility can often lead to security risks as a result of misconfigurations and budget overruns stemming from shadow IT.
When a business invests in public cloud infrastructure—either exclusively or as part of a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud environment—one of the biggest obstacles to maximizing the benefits is understanding and meeting cloud visibility requirements for managing their infrastructure effectively.
This is because, although cloud service providers (CSPs) offer tools to monitor cloud activity, businesses need more context to understand what is going on below the level of abstraction—especially in multicloud and hybrid cloud environments.
This means that businesses operating in the public cloud will encounter blind spots preventing them from identifying their biggest cost drivers or unresolved security and performance issues proactively.
Cloud visibility issues in greater detail
When a business operates in a public cloud, the monitoring tools provided by CSPs only supply log files and basic metadata. These are often sufficient to trigger alerts when security or performance issues arise, but not enough to investigate the issue and identify its cause or impact on other components of the public cloud infrastructure.
While businesses with on-premises infrastructures and private clouds can conduct deeper investigations and correlation analyses of packet data, this option is not available in the public cloud. Consequently, budget issues, security risks, and performance bottlenecks can take longer to resolve and cause more damage the longer they go unnoticed.
With regards to unapproved shadow IT, the bottom line is that you can’t control what you can’t see. The public cloud makes it easier than ever for distributed lines of business to configure critical infrastructure without the controls of traditional on-premises IT.
Addressing cloud visibility issues
The key to meeting cloud visibility requirements starts with leveraging a platform that deploys agents to gather instance-level metrics. The agents report back to the cloud management platform at user-determined intervals so businesses get total visibility of their cloud environments whenever required.
For businesses operating exclusively in a single public cloud environment, agents provide the granular data required to conduct deeper security investigations and correlation analyses, identify the causes of performance issues, and show what unapproved apps and services are deployed in the cloud environment. For businesses operating in a hybrid cloud or multicloud environment, agents can also monitor and deliver data on traffic across all infrastructure hosted on different public cloud platforms.
Meeting your cloud visibility requirements is essential for an effective cloud management strategy. Our customers use the insights into their environment to optimize how their infrastructure is used, automate policy enforcement to prevent misuse, and align their cloud spend and usage with their key business priorities. But it all starts with establishing full visibility across your cloud environment.
