Multicloud adoption: ensuring application performance and a solid security posture

Many organizations are choosing multicloud as their cloud strategy, but many are overlooking how to integrate visibility, performance, and security across these multicloud environments.

Today’s multicloud data center is sophisticated, and with so many options among public cloud (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), and private cloud, hybrid cloud, how do decide on the one that best suits your company’s needs?

According to Flexera 2020 State of the Cloud Report, 93% of enterprises today are going with a multicloud strategy. Enterprises are shifting their applications and data to the cloud, but depending on your goals and ideal business outcomes, you may want to retain control of your physical infrastructure (e.g., compute & OS, network, storage, and choice of SDN). Or, you can leave it up to the public cloud providers so you don’t have to worry about building and operating hardware infrastructure where your applications and data reside.  

Moving applications and data to the cloud allows enterprises to gain greater agility and enables them to focus on developing their apps, analyzing their data, and driving innovation. Using multicloud platforms not only increases efficiency, but enterprises can also better appreciate leveraging cloud services that can offer additional value, helping them to meet initiatives and better achieve successful business outcomes.

So how do you monitor the multicloud?

Monitoring applications in multicloud environments can be cumbersome, especially when using traditional NPMD or APM solutions to monitor native cloud applications deployed on a distributed multi-vendor cloud environment. Unfortunately, using traditional measurement methodologies is not sufficient to ensure application performance and assess security posture in today’s complex multicloud networks. Why? Let me get into that.

DevOps and NetOps teams have been intentionally over-provisioning hardware capacity when deploying their applications in multicloud environments. This is to ensure they have enough headroom for future expansion to meet any unexpected scale demands during an unplanned event.

But, for organizations who want to control their OpEx spend on all these multiple cloud options and who want to be able to monitor their multicloud platform resources in order to determine appropriate resource adjustments, some beefed up monitoring is needed. And it’s needed in one place if you are going to want to be able to avoid or mitigate performance issues across these complex environments.

To do this, you need insight into:

• Latency 
• Flow data
• All transactions
• Processes 
• Software vulnerabilities 
• Alert on anomalies 
• CPU
• Memory 

Enterprises today seek an application-driven cloud. Multicloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) markets have skyrocketed to the likes of billions of dollars.

Enterprise users of multicloud services are continually looking for ways to optimize public cloud performance for their applications, and optimize their spend.

However, many cloud optimization tools, including the tools sold or provided by the native cloud providers themselves, do not take into account the application data, the infrastructure data, or the security data. Beyond that, they have zero insight into the end-to-end functioning of the entire hybrid environment, nor the nearly perimeterless virtual attack surface that organizations have in the post-COVID world.

Performance platforms, like Skylight Analytics, that provide a combined view of cloud performance, physical on-premises (and remote sites) experience plus metrics from high-definition active testing and passive wire analytics allows IT teams to have a holistic view of performance, end-to-end. It not only provides North-South traffic insights, but keeps a steady eye on 100% of the East-West transactions as well. As it’s all available in one view, and correlated to generate additional intelligence, you can quickly drill-down to a detailed, or microscopic, view to understand root cause of any issues while maintaining that comprehensive view of the network end to end.

Get a better view on how Accedian Skylight can help you tame the multicloud wilds. Request a demo today.