Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Eileen Haggerty, Senior Director of Enterprise Business Operations, NETSCOUT
2019: The year of the blind spot
As organizations today embrace IoT
and adopt multiple SaaS and IaaS technologies, multi-cloud environments have
quickly become an increasingly complex reality in modern networks. Businesses
are challenged to identify and resolve issues as they occur and, with multiple
vendors, devices and infrastructure involved, pinpointing and solving
performance and security issues can be no easy task.
Virtualized environments,
software-defined data centers, and multi-cloud approaches bring many benefits
in terms of agility, flexibility and scalability, amongst others. They also
bring increased complexity, however, which can result in blind spots that will
be imperative for organizations to address.
Capitalizing on the opportunities
available requires businesses to have complete visibility into their entire
infrastructure, and all the inter-relationships, such as the applications,
protocols, and elements that are involved in the service delivery process. This
visibility will enable them to ensure efficiency, and optimize their mean time
to repair, getting ahead of any issues that arise. It is, after all, difficult
to fix what you can't see.
It can be hard to manage a
production environment as a virtual entity, for example. While traditional
network tools don't have great visibility into the virtual world, tools from
vendors such as VMware do. However, as these new tools are deployed, connecting
to legacy compute and networking infrastructure can still be a challenge.
Visibility is also of particular
importance to the proper functionality of an organization's DevOps team whose
role is not to simply convert existing apps to make them cloud-enabled, but
about refactoring how they're actually built. The microservice framework used
by a DevOps team might consist of a web server, an app server, and a database
server, in addition to the tools used to help the application management
environment. Complete visibility of the traffic going across these new,
complex, and often hybrid environment networks is crucial to understanding them.
When faced with increasingly
complex, hybrid environments, full and complete visibility is crucial. Blind spots can hinder innovation, efficiency
and security and, if left unchecked, can increase the risk of outages and
downtime. The only way for a business to see what is occurring across its
transforming network is to employ tools able to see across multiple
environments, virtual and legacy. Keeping a watchful eye on their transformed
infrastructure will allow them to fully enjoy the benefits it offers.
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About the Author
As Senior Director of
Enterprise Business Operations, Eileen Haggerty is responsible for working with
enterprise customers to ensure that NETSCOUT's service assurance and
cybersecurity solutions are meeting the needs of our customers and the market.
Eileen has over 15 years working at NETSCOUT, where she has held several
product management and marketing roles. Prior to joining NETSCOUT, Eileen
leveraged her MBA from Boston College working in a variety of technical
marketing roles at Motorola Codex, Racal Data Group and Celox Networks.