One of the challenges of cloud, in general, is visibility into what’s happening in your environment. The reason for that, of course, is that cloud isn’t really your environment. The cloud is the cloud provider’s environment; you’re just using it, along with all the other customers of that cloud provider. Your visibility is limited to your virtual machine, not to the underlying hardware. You may have limited access to logs showing events on the network and access to the underlying devices.
Multicloud multiplies the difficulty of gaining an understanding of your environment. First, there’s the simple fact that there’s more to monitor and oversee. It’s also more difficult to ensure that governance policies and security controls are applied consistently across your entire infrastructure.
But the need for visibility isn’t just about security. Multicloud makes it easy for shadow IT to get lost in the mix. Although the goal of multicloud is often to optimize the pairing of workloads and clouds, multicloud can make it difficult to track where resources are deployed and lead to redundant deployments and excess spending.
Finally, visibility is complicated because you need to monitor at the micro level, not just the macro level. You don’t care about the question “is X cloud provider up?”; you care about the question, “is X cloud provider’s Y service up?”. As applications shift to service-oriented architecture, and services become microservices, the number of APIs you need visibility into skyrockets. And there’s no consistent approach to providing visibility for APIs, particularly across vendors.
Visibility Within a Cloud
Your existing network monitoring tools aren’t enough to provide cloud visibility, as they’re limited to data flows outside of the cloud environment.
Each cloud provider, of course, provides visibility tools, but those are limited to looking within their own cloud environment. Even without the complexity of multi-cloud, their tools don’t solve the visibility problem, because they don’t show the status of anything outside of their cloud, like the clients of cloud within your data center. Relying on your cloud provider’s visibility tools doesn’t give you a comprehensive view of your infrastructure even if you have only a single cloud provider.
The only way to truly gain visibility into a multicloud environment is to use a third-party dashboard that compiles data from all your clouds and presents a consolidated view. Only by seeing all your clouds will you truly understand your usage, your utilization, your spending, and your security. Ideally, the tool will operate both ways, allowing you to deploy system configurations and security policies across all your clouds as well as reporting information.
VAST IT Services brings its deep cloud experience to supporting your multicloud infrastructure. With VAST View, we leverage the power of CloudHealth to provide visibility and management that addresses cost, governance, and security concerns. Contact VAST IT Services to learn more about how you can gain visibility and control over a complex, multicloud environment.
