“The State of Cloud Monitoring Report” sponsored by Ixia, a Keysight Business, highlights the security and monitoring challenges faced by enterprise IT (information technology) staff in managing public and private cloud deployments. It also reveals that less than only 20 percent of IT professionals have complete and timely access to critical data in public clouds.

Dimensional Research conducted the survey and polled 338 IT professionals across organizations of diverse size and industries globally. Keysight Technologies is a technology solutions company that offer hardware and software products.

The report also found out that companies have low visibility into their public cloud environments and the tools and data supplied by cloud providers are insufficient. If IT personnel have limited visibility of cloud activities, they may not be able to detect any security threat or diagnose application performance issues. Their capacity to monitor and deliver against service-level agreements are also limited. There will be delays in detecting and resolving security vulnerabilities and exploits.

Business critical apps

“This survey makes it clear that those responsible for hybrid IT environments are concerned about their inability to fully see and react to what is happening in their networks, especially as business-critical applications migrate to a virtualized infrastructure,” said Recep Ozdag, general manager and vice president, product management in Keysight’s Ixia Solutions Group. “This lack of visibility can result in poor application performance, customer data loss, and undetected security threats, all of which can have serious consequences to an organizations’ overall business success.”

Nearly all respondents (99 percent) identified a direct link between comprehensive network visibility and business value. The results confirm that IT professionals see a direct connection between access to packet data and their ability to maintain cloud security and performance. The report also found out that 87 percent of respondents expressed fears that a lack of cloud visibility is obscuring security threats to their organization while 95 percent of respondents said visibility problems had led them to experience an application or network performance issue. About 38 percent cited insufficient visibility as a key factor in application outages, and 31 percent in network outages.

Ensure performance

The report saw 99 percent of respondents agreeing that comprehensive visibility has direct value to their organizations.

These IT professionals believe that monitoring and ensuring application performance (60 percent), enabling threat identification (59 percent), and identifying security ‘indicators of compromise’ (57 percent) are the main benefits of having visibility solutions.

In terms of data privacy health, respondents are leaning toward data centers over hybrid cloud. The respondents also lament that some cloud providers are not providing the level of visibility they need.

Only 20 percent of IT professionals surveyed said that they had complete and timely access to data packets in public clouds as opposed to the private clouds where 55 percent reported that they have adequate access. However, data centers provide the most visibility with 82 percent of respondents agreeing to this on-premise data center advantage.

Packet-level visibility is critical for monitoring with 86 percent of respondents stated visibility was important for network and application performance monitoring and 93 percent stated it was valuable for security. The survey also revealed that visibility is critical for monitoring cloud performance, as well as validating application performance prior to cloud deployment. Predicting performance is a key challenge with 87 percent of cloud users find it difficult to predict application performance in the cloud.