Efficient Hybrid Cloud Monitoring - Benefits and Challenges

This blog will discuss hybrid cloud monitoring, namely:

• Why companies are adopting hybrid cloud
• The challenges of hybrid cloud monitoring
• How to achieve efficient hybrid cloud monitoring with Silk

Efficient Hybrid Cloud Monitoring – Benefits and Challenges

Hybrid cloud environments involve a mix of public and private clouds, often from multiple vendors.  While these environments have their advantages, they can be difficult for IT to monitor and manage effectively. This complexity is exacerbated by the need to manage other concerns, such as infrastructure upgrades and regulatory compliance. As companies increasingly adopt hybrid cloud environments, efficient and effective hybrid cloud monitoring is a must.

Why Are Companies Adopting Hybrid Cloud? 

While many organizations were already moving towards the cloud before the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to support a remote, distributed workforce made cloud more important than ever. 81% of organizations claim that their cloud usage has increased as a result of COVID-19.

Of those organizations using cloud-based resources, the majority are using hybrid cloud, which combines both public and private cloud deployments. 78% of cloud users have deployed hybrid cloud environments.

This widespread adoption is driven by the numerous benefits that the hybrid cloud provides, including:

• Flexibility: Public and private cloud environments are very different, and each offers its own benefits and drawbacks. With a hybrid cloud deployment, a company can mix and match platforms to ensure that all of their data and applications are hosted in the environments best suited to them.
• Vendor Lock-In: Several cloud vendors exist, each with their own environments that are optimized for particular use cases. With a hybrid cloud environment, an organization avoids placing all of their resources under the control of a single vendor.
• Data Control: Public and private clouds offer a tradeoff between the full benefits of the cloud (flexibility, scalability, cost, etc.) and control over an organization’s data and applications. With a hybrid cloud environment, an organization can store sensitive data in a more protected private cloud, while placing less sensitive resources in the public cloud.
• Regulatory Compliance: Numerous data protection regulations have gone into effect in recent years, and each has its own requirements for the protection of customer data. Placing regulated data on the private cloud helps organizations to meet these requirements.

The move to the cloud seems inexorable, and hybrid cloud deployments appear to be the way of the future.  However, as companies adopt hybrid cloud, they also need to learn to manage and secure it.

Hybrid Cloud Monitoring is Challenging

Hybrid cloud environments are complex, heterogeneous environments.  This makes them extremely difficult to monitor and secure because solutions and approaches that work in one environment may be ineffective in another.

Hybrid cloud monitoring involves maintaining visibility and control over an organization’s cloud environments. Some of the main challenges of hybrid cloud monitoring include:

• Complex Environments: Hybrid cloud deployments include multiple types of cloud infrastructure, potentially from several cloud services providers. The complexity of these environments makes it difficult to configure and monitor them effectively and securely.
• Limited Visibility: One of the main benefits of the cloud is that the cloud service provider is responsible for deploying and maintaining the underlying infrastructure. However, this is also one of the biggest challenges for monitoring the cloud. Without the ability to control or even access the underlying infrastructure, cloud customers lack full visibility into their environments and cannot use security tools designed for use on premises. This makes it difficult to achieve the deep visibility necessary to effectively secure their cloud environments.
• Multiple Silos: By definition, hybrid cloud deployments are siloed. Organizations are using both public and private cloud infrastructure, from multiple vendors. These silos make it difficult to achieve consistent visibility across an organization’s entire hybrid environment.
• Vendor-Specific Solutions: Many cloud services providers offer tools designed to help their customers maintain visibility into and secure their environments. However, these solutions differ from one vendor to the next and potentially between a particular vendor’s different service offerings. As a result, it can be difficult to properly deploy and configure all of the vendor-specific tools to provide the level of visibility that companies need into their cloud environments.

Many cloud environments are “one size fits all” with limited ability to adapt to meet the unique needs of the customer. While this can make cloud monitoring difficult enough, the use of a hybrid cloud environment means that organizations have the same problem many times over.

Achieving Efficient Hybrid Cloud Monitoring 

Many of the challenges with hybrid cloud monitoring come from the fact that an organization is relying on multiple vendor-specific solutions. This complex environment – combined with limited monitoring solutions – makes it difficult to effectively maintain visibility into hybrid cloud environments. As a result, the hybrid cloud is difficult to optimize or secure.

The Silk Platform reduces the challenges of monitoring the hybrid cloud. Silk supports all major cloud environments, providing an integrated solution across an organization’s entire hybrid environment. Within a single pane of glass, an organization can gain detailed insights about how their cloud is performing and configure cloud environments to dynamically spin up and shut down resources to meet service level agreements (SLAs). All of this is paired with Silk’s unique data management capabilities to optimize resource utilization and deployment across complex cloud environments.

The hybrid cloud is complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. To learn how to optimize your hybrid cloud monitoring and regain control of your cloud, check out the Silk Platform.