Monitoring gaps in public cloud

A recent survey by Keysight Technologies on The State of Cloud Monitoring highlights significant security and monitoring issues in public cloud environments that are increasingly facing IT staff.

In total, 338 IT professionals from companies of various industries and sizes participated in the survey commissioned by Ixia Solutions Group. The results show that many companies have little insight into their public cloud environments. Often, the tools and data provided by cloud providers do not help much.

The lack of transparency then leads to a variety of problems. As a result, IT staff members are often unable to track or diagnose application performance issues or are unable to monitor and comply with service level agreements. In addition, there are often delays in detecting and resolving security vulnerabilities and misuse.

Eighty-seven percent of respondents fear that lack of cloud visibility obscures their company's security threats. Ninety-five percent of respondents said that visibility issues led them to have a problem with application or network performance. 38 percent believe that inadequate transparency is a key factor in application outages and 31 percent see it as the cause of network outages.

As a result, nearly all respondents (99 percent) believe that there is a direct link between comprehensive network transparency and real business value. Key benefits include monitoring and ensuring application performance (60 percent), identifying threats (59 percent), and detecting compromise indicators (57 percent). So IT professionals see a direct relationship between accessing packet data and their ability to maintain security and performance in the cloud.

Cloud providers do not provide enough transparency

The survey focused on the challenges of monitoring public and private clouds and local data centers. Especially public cloud environments are difficult to monitor. Less than 20 percent of IT professionals said they have complete, timely access to data packets in public clouds. In private clouds the situation is better. Here, 55 percent report sufficient access. In local data centers, 82 percent have the required transparency. However, packet-level visibility is critical to monitoring: 86 percent of respondents said that transparency is important for monitoring network and application performance, and 93 percent said it was about security.

The survey also found that transparency is critical to monitoring cloud performance and validating application performance before cloud deployment. Predicting performance is a key challenge. 87 percent of cloud users find it difficult to assess. So the survey results clearly show that many cloud providers do not provide the level of transparency that the IT professionals entrusted with managing the private and public clouds really need.

"This survey makes it clear that in field of information an technology in this modern world  what's happening in their networks, especially when migrating mission-critical applications to a virtualized infrastructure," says Recep Ozdag. General Manager and Vice President, Product Management at Keysights Ixia Solutions Group. "This lack of visibility can lead to poor application performance, loss of customer data, and undetected security threats that can seriously impact a company's overall business performance."