How hidden blind spots quietly became cybersecurity’s biggest vulnerability.

Most security programs don’t fail because leaders make bad decisions. They fail because leaders make decisions without enough clarity. And clarity is exactly what modern environments have taken away.

An October 2025 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of NETSCOUT shows something every defender has felt but struggled to quantify; organizations are losing visibility faster than they can regain it.

65% struggle to maintain a unified view across cloud and on-prem.
58% struggle to gain visibility into east–west movement, the path attackers rely on most.

These numbers don’t point to a tooling problem. They point to a structural one.

The Blind Spots Aren’t Small, They’re Foundational

Cloud adoption, microservices, encrypted traffic, and hybrid architectures changed the surface area faster than traditional monitoring could adapt. What used to be a simple perimeter is now a constantly shifting mesh of connections; some permanent, some short-lived, some in regions your tools don’t reach.

The result?

A patchwork of partial insights.

Data in the Forrester study makes one thing clear: most organizations are seeing slices of their environment, not the system as a whole.

And attackers know it.

Partial Visibility = Partial Defense

When environments fragment, every downstream security function suffers:

• Threat detection relies on inference instead of evidence
• Investigations start with guesswork instead of context
• Zero Trust becomes theoretical instead of enforceable
• AI models learn from incomplete data
• SOC analysts drown in alerts they can’t easily validate

The irony is that teams have more data than ever. They just don’t have the data that actually matters when an incident unfolds.

A New Kind of Visibility Layer Emerges

The organizations that are getting ahead of this crisis aren’t adding more dashboards. They’re rebuilding visibility around something more fundamental: deep, consistent, packet-level awareness across hybrid infrastructure.

This is why so many are now looking to Network Analysis and Visibility (NAV) as the new foundation. A modern NAV approach, the kind Forrester describes, offers more than traffic monitoring.

It reconstructs what’s actually happening:

• North–south and east–west behavior
• Encrypted traffic patterns
• Hybrid-cloud movement across workloads
• Real-time evidence paired with retrospective context

When visibility shifts from “collected logs” to “ground truth,” everything becomes easier.

Where Omnis Cyber Intelligence Fits

This is why solutions like Omnis Cyber Intelligence are showing up in forward-looking architectures.
Omnis Cyber Intelligence was built for this visibility crisis:

• It captures packet-level detail at line rate, exactly the capability 86% of respondents say they need.
• It provides deep hybrid visibility, unifying traffic across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud, addressing the 65% struggling with consistency.
• It analyzes encrypted traffic behavior without breaking privacy, the priority 77% of organizations now call essential.
• It applies Adaptive Threat Analytics to turn evidence into insight, reducing time spent correlating data manually.

This isn’t a workaround. It’s a visibility-first approach that we believe aligns precisely with the problems quantified in the Forrester study.

The Real Challenge for Leaders

If leaders want to reduce risk in a meaningful way, they need to rebuild visibility intentionally, not incrementally.

The Forrester commissioned study is an essential wake-up call because it quantifies what many have sensed: the visibility we relied on is gone, and the future requires a different foundation.

The organizations that recognize this first will gain clarity, speed, and resilience.

Those who wait will keep fighting battles in the dark.

Read the commissioned Forrester Consulting Opportunity Snapshot
Learn more about Omnis Cyber Intelligence