To Cloud or Not to Cloud? That is No Longer the Question.

Our world has experienced a massive shift to online work and play, which has accelerated an already-rapid adoption of cloud services. A recent Accenture study found that 92 percent of organizations already are at least somewhat in the cloud, and that as of 2020, approximately 50 percent of all corporate data was stored in the cloud. Worldwide expenditures on public cloud services are projected to grow by more 18 percent this year alone.

This has resulted in a fundamental shift in how companies build and manage their infrastructure, and they need to rethink their monitoring strategies as a result. One prime example is cloud migration.

Constant innovations in cloud technology, including a wealth of affordable hybrid cloud solutions, has enabled IT organizations to implement significant workload migration projects in the cloud. With more and more businesses moving vital services to the cloud, shifting infrastructure to co-los, reengineering private data centers, and embracing new software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, the importance of ensuring the performance and security of networks and applications has never been greater.

The challenge has been that cloud-based tools used to evaluate and troubleshoot issues have tended to be cloud dependent. With today’s hybrid, multi-cloud environments, which typically involve multiple vendors delivering different aspects of critical services, a lack of visibility across the many complex edges involved leaves IT in the dark.

Preserving User Experience and Quality of Service Pre- and Post-Migration

To assure the quality of service and user experience prior to and following workload migration, IT needs troubleshooting capabilities that are both cloud and application agnostic. This is made all the more difficult because the underlying infrastructure is generally owned and managed by multiple IT domains and external third parties.

Dealing with issues is considerably more challenging when those responsible aren’t even in the war room. With these complex environments, there can be a nearly infinite number of possible causes to a problem. This serves to only further exacerbate the finger-pointing during triage and troubleshooting, making it that much harder and time-consuming to resolve the problem.

An Array of Edges Creates Visibility Challenges

The many edges found throughout the IT environment—from client edge, to network edge, to data center/cloud service edge—can create gaps in visibility. When traffic issues occur at these edges, they can quickly impact the productivity of employees who rely on application services to get mission-critical work done. Because of the sheer numbers of edges involved in day-to-day connectivity, and during cloud migrations in particular, IT needs vendor-agnostic visibility to rapidly identify the source of issues.

Identifying key instrumentation vantage points is crucial for monitoring and troubleshooting application performance issues that threaten the end-user experience. The most effective approach in today’s complex, multi-cloud environments is to monitor packet data at the different edges and combine that effort with synthetic testing data.

Synthetic testing that includes business transaction testing capabilities allows IT to simulate an end-user’s interactions with an enterprise’s applications. This type of testing can enable IT to obtain detailed performance and availability data, so they can readily identify any problems before, during, and after application migrations to the cloud. In some cases, this can be done even before end users are impacted, preventing broadscale disruptions.

When packet data, gathered at the edge, is brought together with synthetic testing, smart edge monitoring is achieved. NETSCOUT is an industry leader in smart edge monitoring. Our NETSCOUT Smart Edge Monitoring solution provides comprehensive, borderless monitoring and visibility and is the most effective way to assure user experience before and after cloud migration.

Learn more about NETSCOUT's Smart Edge Monitoring here.