Performance Management enables Businesses to Succeed in Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud Environments - Vinay Sharma, Regional Director, India and SAARC, NETSCOUT.

In today’s digital era, cloud computing has reached mainstream status.  Many organizations now want computing and networking services to be delivered just like electricity.  The cloud computing market is witnessing huge growth driven by the cloud’s ability to improve business performance.  There is also an increasing need for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud systems with their economical pay-as-you-go models.  According to Grand View Research, the global cloud computing market was valued at USD 483.98 billion in 2022 and is expected to expand at a CAGR of 14.1% from 2023 to 2030.

As per Flexera’s most recent 2023 State of the Cloud Report findings, cloud adoption is becoming more commonplace, with 65 percent of those surveyed considered heavy users—up from 59 percent in 2021 and 63 percent in 2022.

Cloud is part of the strategic IT plan in most Fortune 2000 enterprise organizations in one way or another. However, IT organizations do face challenges whether adopting SaaS applications, implementing PaaS/IaaS solutions, or migrating an application workload to the public cloud. 

Key Concerns with Cloud Computing

Cloud ecosystems, be it, on-premises, private or public cloud, or virtualized networks, are mired in complexity.  Disruptions and outages in cloud-based applications can cost companies millions of dollars in lost revenue, employee productivity, reputational damage, and recovery efforts.

The Flexera study also revealed the following concerns

?       Managing cloud spending (82 percent) has taken over as the top cloud challenge for enterprises. 

?       Cloud security considerations continue to be a primary concern with adopters (78 percent).

?       Lack of resources or expertise (80 percent)

?       Managing multi-cloud environments (80 percent)

Digital transformations, SaaS adoptions, Cloud migrations, and a hybrid workforce have all significantly altered the complexity of today’s connected world. Unfortunately, performance problems have become more complex and challenging due to a lack of visibility and control.  Moreover, applications are spread beyond their own data center into CoLo, Cloud, or SaaS environments, where there are several edges to the combined network. 

Many a time, the security teams have limited or no visibility into the network.  Unfortunately, by leveraging AI and Machine learning technologies, cyberattacks are able to evade detection and forensics.  It is only in the network the adversaries will not succeed in erasing their tracks.

Furthermore, due to automation and orchestration, the security teams also have no direct control over such environments. Only proper network visibility of the traffic flow can help to address this issue. 

With a few clicks and configurations, companies can quickly scale their cloud environment to respond to changes in demand, causing visibility gaps. Understaffed IT departments lack proactive monitoring and analysis across the systems, servers, applications, and endpoints that make up their evolving ecosystem. Without performance management, it is difficult to quickly detect and troubleshoot degradations before they affect employees and customers.

Also, for faster business outcomes, one needs scalable insights at every edge across the unique cloud workloads, environments, processes, and dependencies.

Cloud Visibility provides the Solution

Only solutions that provide complete, real-time deep packet inspection across multi-cloud and hybrid environments can address these concerns.  They should be able to remove visibility blind spots by providing performance monitoring capability in any infrastructure, for any application, for any user, anywhere, including, hybrid cloud, cloud migrations, and SaaS and UCaaS applications.

These solutions should help enterprises pinpoint and fix the root causes of bottlenecks, slowdowns, degradations, and security threats hiding in networks and between applications.

For migrating services and applications to the cloud, organizations need visibility before, during, and after migration. They should be able to understand all application and service dependencies and performance issues throughout the process and ensure performance levels are maintained.

Post-migration, organizations should be able to monitor performance and troubleshoot across all environments simultaneously via a single pane of glass. The visibility provided should ensure organizations receive performance intelligence and actionable metadata regardless of the cloud provider.

The solution should also provide support for both physical as well as virtual environments, thereby reducing the need for, and the cost and complexity of using multiple solutions.