Securing the Cloud: The Power of Network Observability in Hybrid Environments

Cloud adoption is surging, with the market projected to reach over $350 billion in the next five years. Research by Enterprise Strategy Group shows that 86% of organizations use two or more public cloud services. Securing these cloud and hybrid environments will become increasingly important as more organizations migrate critical services and applications to the cloud.

Progress Flowmon is an effective solution for system admins and other IT professionals to address the observability gaps common in rapidly expanding hybrid and multiple cloud environments.

During a recent webinar, the Flowmon team discussed the importance of cloud security in these hybrid and multi-cloud environments many organizations have deployed over the last few years using public, private and hybrid cloud deployment models.

Building on our blog post, “Four Things to Consider as You Migrate Services to the Cloud,” the webinar outlines the importance of effective root cause analysis and troubleshooting in multi-cloud deployments. It also details the challenges many network operations teams face when managing security and interoperability in multi-cloud environments.

Check out the recording, then read on to learn how to use Flowmon solutions to enhance network monitoring, observability and security.

What Makes the Hybrid Cloud?

Everyone reading this blog is likely aware of cloud deployment and that splitting applications and other deployments across on-premises data centers and multiple cloud providers forms a hybrid cloud. Our webinar summarizes this information, but it’s worthwhile to define the five key characteristics of cloud computing:

1. Resource pooling
2. On-demand self-service
3. Broad network access
4. Rapid elasticity
5. Measured service

A hybrid cloud environment combines elements from public and private clouds. Public clouds, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform are owned and operated by these third-party providers. Private clouds are owned and implemented within an organization’s data centers. In a hybrid model, data and applications get shared between these environments in an integrated way. 

Hybrid deployment allows organizations to meet their application performance and data security needs. The use of multiple public cloud services has become the norm. Benefits of a multi-cloud strategy include avoiding vendor lock-in, accessing best-of-breed services and improving resiliency. However, most organizations unintentionally end up with multi-cloud environments as projects are commissioned and completed, often leading to management challenges.

The Challenges of Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Deployments

Operating in a hybrid and multi-cloud network environment introduces several challenges for network operations (NetOps) teams:

• Integration and management complications due to multiple network architectures with differing tools and terminology across cloud providers.
• Divided visibility due to inconsistent monitoring and logging capabilities across several vendor-specific solutions.
• Difficulty in maintaining consistent security policies and compliance with regulatory requirements across multiple platforms.
• Increasingly complex troubleshooting across multiple environments. Root cause analysis and issue resolution are more challenging due to the dispersed nature of resources.
• Inflated or unexpected costs for data transfer between cloud services.

How NetOps Can Make Hybrid-Cloud Easier

NetOps teams can address the issues that flow from operating in a hybrid cloud environment by implementing the following:

• Proactive monitoring of network performance and security metrics.
• Robust security measures and compliance checks.
• Automation tools for routine tasks and anomaly detection.

Dealing with the issues also requires monitoring solutions with capabilities such as:

• In-depth visibility across the entire hybrid or multi-cloud environment.
• Quick identification of root causes of performance issues.
• Proactive monitoring of critical applications to detect problems before they escalate and cause downtime.
• Security analytics to detect threats in network traffic, including encrypted traffic.
• A unified solution that operates across all network platforms in use and that integrates with existing network and security infrastructure solutions.

Flowmon Delivers Deeper Visibility Into Your Network

Flowmon has the functionality to address the observability gaps that most organizations encounter when operating in a multi- or hybrid-cloud environment. When you deploy Flowmon, your NetOps and security teams can access functionalities such as:

• Full network visibility across on-premises, public and private cloud environments via a single management console.
• Automated root cause analysis and investigations to reduce the mean time to repair. 
• Proactive anomaly detection to identify performance degradations and security threats.
• Scalability to monitor global locations cost-effectively.
• Open APIs to integrate with existing tools and automate responses.

Key features of Flowmon include:

• Agentless design using network telemetry from existing infrastructure or dedicated probes. 
• Virtual and physical collectors and probes to fit into your unique environment.
• Ability to scale up to 2x100G interfaces on networks with heavy traffic patterns.  
• Support for flow logs from major cloud providers as well as L7 application visibility.
• Out-of-the-box dashboards and reports for popular applications and services, plus the ability to create custom dashboards and reports for your environment applications.
• Issue reporting and guidance in understandable language based on the MITRE ATT&CK frameworks.

In a typical hybrid cloud deployment, IT teams deploy Flowmon Probes at each site that needs monitoring. These can be virtual machines supporting up to 2x10G or physical appliances scaling up to 2x100G. The probes send enriched flow data to a centralized Flowmon Collector, which can run on-premises or in the public cloud. As the deployment grows, the collector can be scaled up as needed to accommodate probe data from more locations.

Examples and Case Studies

Our webinar covered the costs associated with downtime due to issues that could have been mitigated by having better observability in hybrid cloud environments. Research shows that the cost of downtime for digital services is high, estimated at $4,500 (€4,150) per minute on average. A 60-minute outage could cost $270,000 (€250,000). 

With an observability solution like Flowmon, the time to identify and resolve issues is significantly reduced. If an hour of downtime was reduced to 10 minutes, that would result in $225,000 (€207,000) in savings.

In addition to the financial savings, the webinar highlights a customer success story in which a healthcare provider was experiencing issues with patient MRI scans not getting correctly saved to network storage. When technical staff investigated, the data storage and the scanner supplier each said that the problem was not theirs. Using Flowmon, the hospital found odd communication patterns, proving the issue was with the scanner supplier application. The hospital’s IT team then swiftly resolved it. This demonstrates the value of having an independent source of truth on the network to resolve disputes between technical teams. In this case, it also helped prevent scan loss, which could’ve resulted in serious medical outcomes.

In addition to the examples discussed in the webinar and summarized in this post, an additional 1,500+ organizations around the world use Flowmon solutions to monitor their networks.

Try Flowmon Yourself

If you’d like to speak with an expert about how Flowmon can help improve the security of your networks or to schedule a 20-minute product demo, contact us.

For a free trial of Flowmon to see how it can deliver actionable insights for your organization within 30 minutes, visit our  free trial page. Our support team can assist during your free trial testing.