Multi-Cloud Strategies and Netography: Gain without the Pain
By Matt Wilson, VP Product Management
We’ve talked before about cloud transformation being multi-cloud in practice. In case you need more proof, the federal government recently signaled it is embracing multi-cloud with the announcement of a $9 billion contract spread across AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. And research finds that 89% of organizations have a multi-cloud strategy.
There are a number of different reasons why organizations are choosing multi-cloud, including:
- Business resilience: While every organization really wants to minimize the number of resources they use in order to reduce operational complexity, the reality is no cloud service provider (CSP) is perfect. They all experience outages. So, best practice for enterprises and government agencies is to spread the risk across multiple infrastructures. Diversity has been a tenet of network infrastructure design for decades and has served us well. Using the same approach to mitigate risk in this new paradigm makes good business sense.
- Best of breed capabilities: Different clouds have different strengths in different areas. Development teams may find one application is better suited to be built in one cloud than another. And in order to address a specific IT or business need, nearly half (45%) of 2,500 IT decision makers surveyed say they have five to 10 SaaS vendors, while 23% report using 20-100 across categories including email, collaboration and video calling, customer relationship management (CRM), and human capital management.
- Cost containment: Some services and applications may be less expensive to run in one cloud versus another depending on factors such as performance requirements, data volume, or commitment period. Additionally, costs to operate data centers vary depending on the geographic location of the data center, which also impacts an organization’s CSP mix.
- Compliance: Not all CSPs are equal across all parts of the world. Organizations that need to consider compliance with frameworks and regulations like GDPR, PCI, and NIST need to select CSPs that have built their infrastructure to specifically address issues like data privacy and sovereignty.
Multi-cloud environments are incredibly popular for all these reasons, but they also create pain for security teams that need consistent visibility into network traffic moving to, from, between, and within clouds. The challenge is cloud-based tools focus on providing visibility into specific cloud environments but very rarely into multi-cloud infrastructure. Additionally, few standards exist so the type of data, how that data is captured, and level of visibility each CSP offers varies. What’s more, on-premise and legacy infrastructure isn’t going away any time soon, with 82% of organizations taking a hybrid approach. So, security teams also have a mix of traditional network security tools for on-prem infrastructure.
As a result, in a multi-cloud world, network visibility and detection capabilities are extremely compartmentalized. Teams end up moving between multiple panes of glass and multiple environments, using tools with different capabilities. This creates more complexity which reduces the effectiveness of security teams. It’s no surprise that security concerns and operational complexity top the list of challenges organizations cite with respect to their multi-cloud strategy.
Gain without the pain
At Netography, we’ve been building for a multi-cloud world since our founding and we decided to tackle the network security challenge in an entirely new way to give organizations what they need: consistent visibility, detection, and response capabilities across the entire Atomized Network – multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and on-prem infrastructure.
We do this by taking cloud flow logs from all the major cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud—as well as on-prem network flow logs. We aggregate and normalize that disparate data to have a consistent language. We enrich that data with context at the time of ingestion to add meaning right away, with no additional work required. Our SaaS-based universal platform provides a single pane of glass and intuitive UI, so operators have an easy way to get the answers they need about what’s on their network, what it is doing, what’s happening to it, and what actions to take.
We’ve not just taken the pain out of securing a multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud environment, we’ve turned it into a gain: comprehensive network visibility and control in minutes with the only platform architected to secure the Atomized Network.