Survey: IT pros nostalgic over on-prem data centre visibility

Findings from a new survey have revealed significant security and monitoring challenges faced by IT staff responsible for managing public and private cloud deployments.

The study –  aptly named 'The State of Cloud Monitoring' – was conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Ixia (a Keysight business), polling 338 IT professionals from organisations of a range of sizes and industries around the world.

Perhaps one of the most interesting findings from the study is that a substantial number of companies have low visibility into their public cloud environments, and the tools and data supplied by cloud providers are insufficient.

This lack of visibility, Ixia says, can result in a range of problems including the inability to track or diagnose application performance issues, inability to monitor and deliver against service-level agreements, and delays in detecting and resolving security vulnerabilities and exploits.  Key findings include:

• 87% of respondents expressed fears that a lack of cloud visibility is obscuring security threats to their organization
• 95% of respondents said visibility problems had led them to experience an application or network performance issue
• 38% cited insufficient visibility as a key factor in application outages, and 31% in network outages

"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 virtualised infrastructure," says Keysight's Ixia Solutions Group product management general manager and vice president Recep Ozdag.

"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 organisations' overall business success.

The survey also delved into the differing challenges of monitoring public cloud, hybrid cloud, and traditional on-premises data centers – with the result being the cloud variants are still trailing on-premises data centers in terms of maturity, as IT professionals indicated that cloud providers aren't imparting the level of visibility they need.

Key findings included:

• Less than 20% of IT professionals reported they had complete, timely access to data packets in public clouds. In private clouds, the situation is better, with 55% reporting adequate access. In on-premises data centers, 82% have the visibility they need.
• 86% of respondents stated visibility was important for network and application performance monitoring, and 93% stated it was valuable for security.
• Nearly all respondents (99%) identified a direct link between comprehensive network visibility and business value. The top three visibility benefits cited were monitoring and ensuring application performance (60%), enabling threat identification (59%), and identifying security 'indicators of compromise' (57%).
• 87% of cloud users find it difficult to predict application performance in the cloud.