The hybrid cloud brings new network problems and requires new solutions

The verdict is in: a hybrid cloud model is how businesses have largely decided to approach digital transformation and the modern network in the age of cloud computing.

Businesses leverage a mix of on-premises network resources and cloud hosted storage and applications to offer best-of-breed services to their customers/subscribers. The cloud hosted components provide the businesses/service providers the ability to scale rapidly at a reasonable cost. The on-premise network resources allow the businesses/service provider to maintain tighter control and comply with security standards.

But the hybrid cloud model also introduces new challenges, specifically around complexity, security and network performance management.

New challenges: This isn’t your father’s network

The hybrid cloud undeniably offers many advantages but also makes network and application performance monitoring significantly more challenging.

Network performance no longer is about speed and feeds, with all network performance data traditionally found on-premise and within a few core systems. In the hybrid-cloud era, things have become significantly more distributed and more complex. Traffic is no longer linear (edge to core), with local breakout points, public cloud peering, and so on, making the network more challenging to monitor. Monitoring and operating this modern network is harder at a time where businesses/service providers are trying to reduce operational costs.

The hybrid cloud introduces several new challenges.

1. More complexity and less visibility

The first major challenge is the ability to have end-to-end visibility of the services to ensure service performance is met and to detect any service and application performance degradation. This includes the ability to distribute testing services across new kinds of physical or/and virtual infrastructure and cloud locations and to be able to test in a mesh across all of these new endpoints and environments.

Continuing with the traditional approach of using different tools and technologies to monitor various parts of the network results in data and reporting silos that reduce an organization’s ability to see what’s actually going on and overall productivity.

2. Security oversight difficulty

The hybrid cloud complicates the security stance of an organization, both through extra complexity (read: an increased attack surface) and delegation of security to multiple parties within the stack.

Businesses often try to extend private cloud security controls and technology to the public cloud, but this usually is incomplete and ineffective in an environment of dispersed perimeter resources, a shared security model with the public cloud, and technologies such as virtualization. The old network security practices employed by businesses do not hold up in the hybrid cloud environment.

3. Performance tuning and network automation challenges

The ability to isolate and pinpoint what’s causing the service and/or application degradation and trigger rapid and proactive remediation to occur while ensuring that complexity doesn’t mean reduced customer experience and increased costs is another tough balancing act for IT teams and service providers.

Network automation is at the heart of enterprise and service provider digital transformation strategies. A key enabling factor for network automation, in order to leverage closed loop remediation and optimization, requires service assurance and deeper visibility.

Beyond the additional challenge of addressing emergent performance issues, the hybrid cloud makes it harder to proactively fix performance issues before they manifest as actual problems. Without deep visibility into network dynamics, small issues that might develop into larger performance problems go unseen and unaddressed at the early stages before they impact performance.

4. Dispersed monitoring capabilities

Log sources and monitoring tools are dispersed in a hybrid cloud environment when there are on-premise systems combined with and public cloud resources. An organization’s existing network and performance monitoring solutions mix with vendor tools for a siloed approach to monitoring that uses divergent methods and data that is hard to correlate for actual insight into what is going on across the entire network.

This lack of consistent and single pane of glass, end-to-end network monitoring creates the reduced visibility that leads to the other challenges introduced by a hybrid cloud architecture.

New solutions: Full traffic monitoring for actionable visibility

Because networks have changed as a result of hybrid cloud architectures, the approach to monitoring them also must change. To restore full visibility and control in the face of disparate network resources, businesses need a network and application performance monitoring solution that monitors all traffic end-to-end and can pull in third-party data sources for a complete picture of what’s taking place across the network.

Only with this complete picture of real-time monitoring of all network traffic can businesses effectively restore the lost visibility from a hybrid cloud architecture, ensure that suspicious network activity is spotted and correlated to identify true security threats, and proactively address the myriad dynamics that affect hybrid cloud network and application performance.

Instead of alerts that highlight network and application problems without giving insight into how to solve them, complete real-time traffic monitoring enables network engineers in a hybrid cloud environment to quickly identify emerging problems and pinpoint exactly where the problems are taking place in the network.

Accedian Skylight was built from the ground up to bring this level of monitoring and address the challenges of the modern hybrid cloud network environment.

Skylight is a network and application performance monitoring solution that monitors network traffic-end-to-end with lightweight virtual sensors, then feeds this data into an easily understood dashboard that gives a complete, real-time picture of an organization’s network dynamics.

Skylight also enables businesses to feed in third-party data sources into the platform, correlating traffic data with the third-party tools and data sources for an even more complete picture of network and performance dynamics.

To see Accedian Skylight in action, schedule a custom demo today.