Cloud Visibility for Dummies

Introduction

Business and technology are at a critical inflection point.Globalization, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, virtualization, and mobile devices are forcing companies to extend their network edge — often into places where they cannot easily gain visibility. Budgetary constraints, technical limitations, security concerns, and performance issues prevent moving entire IT infrastructures to the cloud, and that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, enterprises are implementing a hybrid model, sending a mix of critical and non-missioncritical workloads outside their on-premises environment. Enterprise applications often comprise a mix of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and custom-developed applications running on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-asa- Service (IaaS) in the public cloud. The business data exchanged among on-premises applications running in corporate data centers and branch offices, as well as public and private clouds, increases the complexity of the end-to-end, real-time visibility needed to identify and predict network outages, identify a security breach, and analyze mission-critical application performance issues. Moving forward, IoT will add additional visibility challenges. This prompts a need to rethink approaches to end-to-end visibility and security in an increasingly complex cloud-based world.