Gaurav Mohan, VP, SAARC & Middle East, NETSCOUT delves into the importance of preserving the user experience and service quality before, during and after cloud migration and how to do it.
As more of our daily transactions and interactions happen online, the adoption of cloud services has accelerated. According to a recent Accenture survey, 92 percent of firms are now using the cloud for some element of their operations. Global spending on public cloud services is expected to increase by 18 percent, as a 300% growth has been witnessed in the UAE’s public cloud consumption since 2020.
It follows that firms must rethink their monitoring tactics due to this fundamental shift in how they design and operate their infrastructure. Cloud migration is an excellent example.
Continuous advancements in cloud technology, including many cost-effective hybrid cloud options, have enabled IT firms to undertake substantial workload migration initiatives in the cloud. With more enterprises transferring critical services to the cloud, reengineering private data centres, and adopting new software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, guaranteeing network and application speed and security has never been more critical.
The problem has been that cloud-based tools for analysing and troubleshooting issues have tended to be cloud-dependent. A lack of visibility across the many complicated edges in today’s hybrid, multi-cloud settings leave IT in the dark.
Pre- And Post-Migration: Preserving User Experience and Service Quality
IT needs troubleshooting skills that are cloud and application-agnostic to ensure the quality of service and user experience before and following workload migration is left uncompromised. This is further complicated due to the underlying infrastructure is often owned and controlled by various IT domains and external third parties.
Dealing with problems is far more difficult when those responsible aren’t present. There can be an endless number of plausible explanations for a problem in these complex situations. This helps intensify the finger-pointing during triage and troubleshooting, making the problem much more complex and time-consuming.
An Abundance of Edges Makes Visibility Difficult
The numerous edges throughout the IT environment—from the client to the network to the data centre/cloud service edge—can cause visibility gaps. When traffic problems are at these edges, it can swiftly affect the productivity of employees who rely on application services to complete mission-critical tasks. As a direct result of the large number of edges involved in daily connection and cloud migrations, IT needs vendor-agnostic visibility to rapidly identify the source of issues.
Identifying key instrumentation vantage points is critical for monitoring and debugging application performance issues that jeopardize the end-user experience. In today’s complicated, multi-cloud setups, the most effective technique is to monitor packet data at several edges and combine that effort with synthetic testing data.
IT can imitate an end-user’s interactions with an enterprise’s applications using synthetic testing, which can also simulate business transactions. This type of testing may provide IT with detailed performance and availability data, allowing them to quickly discover any issues before, during, and after cloud application migrations. This can sometimes be done even before end customers are affected, preventing widespread outages.
Cloud adoption is a necessity in today’s business landscape. While it might be a daunting step to take, it does not have to be as difficult as it is made out to be. Monitoring the edge will prevent challenging situations throughout this journey and help more organizations experience a seamless digital transformation.