Growing Reliance On Multi-Cloud Boosts Need For Smart Data

As the cloud computing market has soared, businesses have begun incorporating a mix of cloud services to meet their Digital Transformation (DX) objectives. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments are fast becoming the option of choice. In fact, according to a recent Information Age article, 451 Research determined that the future of IT is multi-cloud and hybrid with 69 percent of survey respondents planning to incorporate some form of multi-cloud environment by 2019.

While the adoption of multi-cloud environments does enable businesses to mitigate risks and take advantage of the strengths of different providers, it also creates an increasingly complex environment for IT to manage. As more and more data traverses hybrid cloud environments and SD-WAN (software-defined wide-area networks), the need for continuous and scalable monitoring and analysis of traffic flows will become increasingly crucial. Reliance on cloud technologies is making it imperative that IT has end-to-end visibility across data centers, branch offices, cloud environments, and SaaS environments in order to identify existing, as well as potential problems, so they can be resolved quickly.

Being able to see and analyze traffic flows is key to achieving service assurance, security assurance and business analytics. The insights obtained from passive monitoring and real-time analysis of traffic flows can be vital in efforts to drive down CAPEX and OPEX as businesses embrace DX.  

As businesses increasingly incorporate connected devices, such as Internet of Things (IoT), maintaining always-on availability is a competitive necessity. With these connected devices comes a tremendous volume of data traversing both physical and virtual networks. In order to extract real-time insights into service and security assurance, effective analysis and efficient extraction of smart metadata has to be done continuously and at the source.     

To achieve this, IT needs to adopt a Smart Data approach. Such an approach will enable a complete understanding of application performance, service availability, reliability and responsiveness for a top-down, detailed view of the hybrid IT environment. This will allow IT to troubleshoot in real-time, as well as back-in-time. Having a “back-in-time” capability allows IT to learn from past mistakes and modify service delivery to mitigate future issues and risks.

With the growing trend toward multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments, IT should look to smart data to assure the performance of applications and services, as they digitally transform their businesses today and into the future.

This blog is based on the article, The smart way to unleash the power of the cloud, written by Michael Segal, Area VP Strategy at NETSCOUT, which was published on ITProPortal.

Written by Michael Segal on 26th Apr, 2018 in Enterprise