Top Three Reasons Why Cloud Visibility Is Crucial for Cloud Security

The cloud, specifically the hybrid cloud, is now the de facto infrastructure for most organizations, from small companies reliant on SaaS applications to the largest and most complex government agencies and multinational corporations.

There are many reasons why organizations have adopted the cloud, but one of the main reasons is the promise of agility. In the context of the cloud, agility typically means being able to add applications and services quickly and for these applications to be able to scale up and down automatically to meet demand.

However, with this agility comes complexity in the underlying infrastructure and the tools necessary to ensure application performance, security, and compliance. But why is this the case? Let’s explore three of the top factors that drive this complexity and make cloud visibility so hard to achieve.

The Agility vs. Visibility Trade-Off

The unfortunate reality is that delivering operational agility often comes at the expense of infrastructure visibility. Typically, IT teams must support tens or hundreds of applications interoperating across on-premises and virtualized datacenters as well as in private and public clouds. With each new application and each new platform, the challenge to retain visibility increases, especially when combined with the pressure on IT to respond to business in increasingly shorter cycle times.

On-Premises + Private Cloud + Public Cloud = Blind Spots

As the number of platforms increases within organizations, it becomes more and more challenging to gain and maintain visibility into the network communications to, from, and between these platforms. Unless each new network connection is monitored and secured, these connections can become blind spots where adversaries can attack an organization’s network without being detected until the network has been breached.

Containers Create More Blind Spots

Containers are the building blocks of modern, scalable applications. They can be thought of as self-contained virtual computers that execute a single application function. As increased demand causes the application to scale, containers are automatically generated to meet this demand. These containers communicate with each other and, like any other data source or connection, must be monitored and secured to prevent them from becoming security blind spots.

Existing Tools Are Rarely Enough

Although platforms have their own monitoring and security tools, these tools usually work only on a vendor-specific platform. As a result, an ecosphere of third-party visibility and security tools has been developed. Unfortunately, these tools rarely work across all the possible permutations of on-premises, private, and public cloud infrastructures. Additionally, they rely on different forms of data, such as network packets, metrics, events, logs, and traces, to perform their security and compliance tasks, making it even harder to gain consistent visibility.

How Do You Get Cloud Visibility?

Faced with these challenges, how does an organization gain visibility into all network data moving across its cloud infrastructure? To solve the problem, organizations need a cross-platform visibility solution that provides consistent visibility into all network data, regardless of whether it is from on-premises, private, or public cloud sources. This solution must be able to access data from any of these sources, normalize and aggregate it, visualize it through a single-pane-of-glass, and then analyze this data or send it to security analysis tools to identify threats.

Why Cloud Visibility Is Crucial to Cloud Security

The adage that you can’t secure what you can’t see has never been truer than when applied to hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures. As we have seen, the opportunities for blind spots and therefore security vulnerabilities are amplified as cloud infrastructures become more complex and containerized applications more common.

At Gigamon, we’ve been working with 4,000 of the world’s largest and most sophisticated organizations to solve their visibility, performance, and security challenges for over a decade and are the market leader in the visibility and deep observability market.

If you’re concerned that your organization doesn’t have the visibility to operate efficiently and securely in the cloud, please contact us to arrange a demonstration or hands-on evaluation of the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline.