Do More with More: Unraveling the Complexity of Multi-cloud Environments

Gaurav Mohan, VP, SAARC & Middle East, NETSCOUT

Everyone has heard and understands the phrase “do more with less” – but what about doing ‘more with more’? At first glance, it’s clear that you can do more if you have more to do it with, but what if one of both ‘mores’ are not always good? For instance, when one cloud becomes multiclouds overnight with a new combination of public, private, and hybrid clouds plus co-los? 

Certainly, as multiple clouds collaborate, organizations can achieve greater efficiency, improved speed, ease, and cost-effectiveness. Nonetheless, managing a multi-cloud environment presents numerous challenges due to its complexity. The magnitude and diversity of tasks involved have grown exponentially, putting pressure on separate teams with distinct cloud structures, operational definitions of cloud services, security measures, compliance policies, and various tools, all contributing to a lack of comprehensive visibility. There are indeed various challenges to contend with in the multi-cloud landscape.

With cloud application development moving much faster than organizations can keep up with, the cloud’s capacity continues to surprise. A big focus for enterprises now is controlling the increasing complexity of multiservice, multi-cloud environments. But with multiple clouds, there’s no escaping complexity. 

The multicloud approach to enterprise cloud computing takes the hybrid-cloud model and introduces multiple public cloud service providers to meet various needs. Research such as Flexera’s State of the Cloud report shows that multi-cloud is still the most popular strategy among organizations, followed closely by hybrid cloud.

High-performance digital services that run on cloud infrastructures, from customer engagement applications to internal operating services, allow modern businesses to be more agile, cost-effective, and competitive. As cloud providers bring new services to the market, how companies apply cloud computing features will be a key differentiator in their application strategy.

There’s a lot that’s needed for companies to overcome the novel challenges of operating in multicloud environments. Operating in multicloud environments impacts existing processes and methodologies. This also means drastically larger attack surfaces, longer delays in discovering the root cause of service or availability, blind spots to essential parts of the infrastructure or traffic flows, and recalibrating existing technology, tools, and responsibilities.

Cloud Complexity Can Jeopardize Application Performance

Cloud applications have unique limitations, such as development costs, maintenance expenses, traffic volume, and scalability prospects. Internet technology leaders face immense pressure to deliver innovative services for high-end cloud-centric enterprise applications, ensuring seamless connectivity and optimal performance for users.

As systems become more distributed, the methods for building and operating them are rapidly evolving, emphasizing the need for visibility into services and infrastructure. Developers often break applications into microservices, deploying them across distributed cloud servers under DevOps supervision. However, tracking microservice dependencies throughout the service delivery path, encompassing remote campuses, data centers, internet providers, and cloud vendors, poses challenges for DevOps. Additionally, vendors may be hesitant to admit responsibility for service disruption, requiring concrete proof before analyzing or resolving issues. Applications don’t self-correct; disruptions have consequences.

Resolving application performance errors in complex multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures becomes even more intricate as environments evolve regularly. A unified view of physical, virtual, and cloud environments is vital for running applications on infrastructure and achieving total performance visibility across networks.

Successful growth and adaptation rely on meticulous measurement and analysis of all operational facets. Comprehensive performance visibility empowers well-informed decisions, effectively overcoming challenges in dynamic environments.

Companies can only grow or adapt to change if they first measure everything they do.

Deep Packet Inspection Unlocks All Knowledge from the Network

In today’s rapidly expanding networking landscape, interconnectedness is ubiquitous. The significance of a robust monitoring solution cannot be overstated, as it offers cloud-agnostic visibility that swiftly detects and alerts organizations to potential application performance issues. Put simply, any disruption, if unprepared for, has the potential to inflict irreparable harm on an organization.

By monitoring traffic in real-time and analyzing packet data, an unparalleled understanding of application behavior, service dependencies, and error details is achieved. This approach proves to be the most efficient way to identify the root cause of problems. Leveraging scalable deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, precise monitoring of every transaction between devices, applications, clients, and network components becomes possible, whether in physical, virtual, cloud, or hybrid environments on either side of the internet edge. With such comprehensive visibility, organizations can proactively safeguard their operations, ensuring smooth and uninterrupted performance while navigating the complexities of modern interconnected networks.