Top Trend at VMworld 2017: The Lines Are Blurring Within Your Infrastructure

Another VMworld, another chance to prove the necessity of visibility. Hundreds of enterprises and customers across a multitude of verticals and segments came together to showcase solutions for the private cloud and more importantly, to learn from each other how to successfully navigate a virtualized environment. Through all this, one trend stood out.

Organizations are no longer just leveraging one type of infrastructure. Rather, they’re deploying them all – physical, private and public cloud. With VMware announcing a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the 2018 availability of VMware Cloud on AWS in all regions, there’s been a vital shift in the hybrid cloud market. Going forward, organizations will soon be able to adopt and reap the rewards of an agile and flexible public cloud environment while preserving their existing infrastructures and investments.

Still, as enterprises make the move towards a true hybrid – and multi-cloud! – infrastructure, there may be challenges along the way, especially with respect to visibility and security. For example:

• How do you eliminate east-west traffic blind spots? In a virtualized environment, traffic in your virtual machine (VM) does not leave your virtual switch, thus making it difficult to TAP or SPAN the traffic. Though VMware offers port mirroring, there is no way to replicate, optimize and feed traffic to multiple on-premises and virtual tools. The same premise applies in the public cloud, where there is no east-west visibility between compute instances because there is no access to the network layer. How to meet the challenge? The Gigamon Visibility Platform – it provides pervasive traffic visibility across public, private and hybrid infrastructures to help you prevent lateral propagation of threats, enable compliance and maintain your security posture no matter where workloads are located.
• Does your visibility dynamically scale with your applications? Due to the dynamic environment of public and private clouds, application scale is constantly changing. Your visibility needs to follow it – meaning you need packet-level visibility as VMs or cloud instances scale up or down. With the Gigamon Visibility Platform, you get that scalable insight into your entire infrastructure that also helps minimize the risk of a security breach.
• How do you extend your existing security investment to the hybrid cloud? As you move from physical to the private and public cloud, you could be forced to deploy net-new tools in these environments, which can drive up complexity and costs. The Gigamon Visibility Platform enables a seamless transition to these new environments in two ways:
  1. Migration to the cloud requires continuous packet-level visibility, and the Gigamon Visibility Platform helps ensures the smooth transition of applications and workloads to these new environments.
  2. You’ll need to extend your existing security posture to the private and public cloud. With the Gigamon Visibility Platform, you can send traffic to existing tools, whether they are located on-premises or in the cloud.

It’s a transformative time for many enterprises that are often challenged with migrating and securing applications and workloads in private and public clouds. However, with potentially severe financial consequences or even impact to brand reputation, failure to take every precaution against security breaches is not an option.

Let Gigamon help you see what matters.™ Learn more about the Gigamon Data Center and Virtualization Solution and the Gigamon Visibility Platform for AWS.