Blind spots are IT’s worst enemy

Emad Fahmy, Systems Engineering Manager, Middle East, NETSCOUT talks about cloud migration, advantage of cloud software monitoring and why blind spots are IT’s worst enemy.

The complexity of today’s network environments is increasing. Many businesses are implementing hybrid strategies that include apps and virtualization services. In the Middle East, a majority of UAE-based businesses are increasingly adopting data-driven strategies for an effective hybrid workforce. As a result of these measures, they have been able to considerably improve their company outcomes.

At the market level, 88% of UAE-based IT decision-makers (ITDMs) agree that their current strategy is key to their business resiliency. A further 79% of ITDMs believe that their organizations’ technology and infrastructure could be improved in order to meet their existing and/or future data strategy needs. Besides, 42% of businesses in the UAE, on average, are dedicating time and resources to cloud migration and strategy.

The expanding trend toward public/private cloud, private data centres, and virtualized/software-defined network environments is posing new and more challenging difficulties for IT departments, calling for them to collaborate with a variety of suppliers to guarantee robust network and service performance and security.

In 2020, a study anticipated the hybrid cloud industry to be valued at US$56 billion, with that figure expected to rise to US$145 billion by 2026. According to a recent study, almost 90% of survey respondents said they used the cloud in 2021, an incredible 88% increase from 2020. Two-thirds of those polled said they use a public cloud, 45% said they use a private cloud, and 55% said they use traditionally managed on-premises infrastructures.

Cloud migration
Increasing business agility calls upon smooth cloud migration as well as the confident development and deployment of new services and application modernization. Doing it correctly entails providing a superior user and client experience. As a result, businesses must balance faster time-to-value with efficient management of a globally distributed hybrid architecture that includes on-premises and cloud installations.

Enterprises seek end-to-end visibility from a single pane of glass in a digital-first and hyperconnected environment. This visibility must provide actionable intelligence on application performance, user experience, and cyberthreats that organizations are confronted with across the hybrid architecture’s enlarged attack surface.

It’s crucial to help organizations gain the end-through-end visibility and actionable intelligence they need to migrate services to the cloud and assure their performance and security in a hybrid architecture.

This can be accomplished by capturing packet data traversing the cloud environment and performing simultaneous deep-packet inspection and real-time analysis.

It is also important to develop a packet acquisition strategy that relies on smart data generated by processing and analysing packet data across the hybrid architecture, including on-premises environments, and in the cloud. This is the ultimate source of truth.

Blind Spots 
Blind spots are created by the complexity of hybrid infrastructures. IT professionals may struggle to ensure service availability and performance across the network and apps if visibility into the network and applications is insufficient. With several strategic technical partners and a myriad of monitoring technologies involved, troubleshooting issues effectively and quickly becomes increasingly difficult.
The lack of visibility across the entire infrastructure leads to greater finger-pointing, making problem-solving even more complex and expensive. End-to-end visibility is required, which is referred to as visibility without borders.

Effective Troubleshooting Requires Visibility Without Borders
From the data centre to the cloud, and everywhere in between, visibility without borders provides all-encompassing visibility. To acquire priceless insights into the most complicated situations, vendor-agnostic solutions eliminate the requirement for a bushel-basket full of non-integrated point tools. The full visibility and analysis solutions allow end-to-end analysis for any service, everywhere.

For the optimal user experience, having a single source for numerous monitoring needs, such as network and application performance management, is critical.

The Advantage of Cloud Software Monitoring
Through cloud monitoring and service assurance solutions, visibility without borders provides invaluable insights into hybrid networks and applications.

Whether the environment is on-premises, co-located, private and public cloud, SaaS, or a virtualized network, visibility without borders is useful for diagnosing performance issues.

Solutions that leverage evidence from actual use in the customer environment are assisting customers and vendors in better collaborating. The end result being reduced overheads and most importantly, enhanced end-user experience.