Actionable visibility is key to effective Hybrid Cloud Management - Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India & SAARC, NETSCOUT

Cost optimisation and interoperability are driving the adoption of hybrid cloud models by Enterprises globally. Hybrid cloud technology is undoubtedly the future of cloud storage and has evolved into a critical business solution for organisations, therefore managing this environment is equally important.  To understand the significance of the ‘visibility’ factor in hybrid cloud management, let us look into the game of chess. Here, the player constantly needs to have clear visibility of the chessboard and pawns, which is the base to make a decision for the next move and successfully continue playing the game. The same rule applies if you are the head of IT operations at your organisation, managing cloud or data centre assets. Having actionable visibility in hybrid cloud environments supports enterprises and IT teams in risk reduction, ensuring continuity of operations and achieving business goals. IT operations team should gain visibility of the hybrid cloud infrastructure to put in place the most appropriate IT strategy that leads to informed business decisions. This clear understanding of the IT landscape drives employee productivity and innovation, while ensuring cost optimization and better resource management.

However, with more and more enterprises deploying complex hybrid infrastructure, ensuring clear visibility across multiple platforms can pose a serious challenge. Many a time, this lack of visibility will make extremely difficult for organisations to eliminate any slump in the hybrid landscape resulting in under-utilised resources and over-spending. Therefore, it is imperative for IT leaders to answers questions on the dynamics of every cloud instance, at any given time.

Solve the visibility gap with NETSCOUT nGenuiusONE Platform

Agility and flexibility advantages, which are brought about by hybrid environments, have often been associated with complexities too that have to be timely addressed by IT teams. Dealing with unseen applications’ usage is also increasing with their growing numbers. Remote work culture and increase in hybrid workforces due to social distancing, brought in additional complications to Network Operations (NetOps) and Security Operations (SecOps). Controlling the application sprawl and discovering unmanaged applications across physical, virtual and remote environments are top concerns for IT leaders. Any visibility blind spot can negatively impact employee productivity and the smooth flow of business services. It is mandatory today, for IT operations team at every organisation to cater to this new service delivery environments and ensure business continuity.

nGeniusONE Service Assurance platform from NETSCOUT can be leveraged to reduce IT fatigue and tool sprawl with a single-vendor approach by identifying the root cause on issues impacting any user, on any service and on any network.

It is a real-time information platform that provides a ‘single pane of glass’ to view the data, voice and video service delivery performance to manage both the availability and quality of user experience. nGeniusONE is crucial during cloud-migration as it provides pre-cloud migration visibility into service dependencies, end-thru-end visibility and actionable insights during cloud migration. It also supports post-cloud migration monitoring, troubleshooting and optimisation of service performance. For hybrid cloud environments the solution assures service delivery and quality besides managing application performance and optimising user experience. Other capabilities of the solution include, UC&C (Unified Communication and Collaboration) technology monitoring which is necessary for assuring performance of multi-vendor conferencing platforms. It also monitors solutions involving Contact Centres, Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UcaaS) options, on-premises voice and video services and Sessions Initiation Protocol trunking deployments. Network performance management including validating the performance of internet band-width, VPN capacity and hybrid cloud/SaaS performance levels are also addressed with the solution.

This solution from NETSCOUT enables organisations to confidently deploy and secure applications and services across hybrid cloud environments by reducing MTTK (Mean Time to Knowledge), through service-centric dashboards and top-down root cause analysis. Being available on both hardware and virtual platforms, nGeniusONE offers unmatched service assurance value in measuring user experience too, in addition to the monitoring function – all through a single-pane-of-glass view!