How Network Observability Maintains Smoother Operations in Hybrid Cloud Setups

In today's dynamic business landscape, swift network analysis and troubleshooting are paramount, especially in the complex hybrid cloud environments that many organisations operate within. The hybrid cloud market size is estimated to grow from USD 129.68 billion in 2024 to USD 352.28 billion by 2029.

Understanding what’s happening in your networks is vital to mitigating risks and optimising business efficiency.

Hybrid cloud deployments may offer the ultimate in flexibility for scaling businesses. However, it is crucial to understand some of the key challenges IT teams face when identifying security threats, delivering robust operations and maintaining optimal performance levels.

The Challenges of Hybrid Cloud Deployments

The appeal of hybrid cloud deployments is that they offer the agility and scalability of the public cloud combined with the more controlled and secure on-premises infrastructure. However, this goes alongside visibility limitations, as many organisations struggle to maintain a view of what is happening across their on-premises and cloud environments. This can lead to performance monitoring, security and operational management issues.

Common observability challenges within hybrid cloud environments include:

Divided visibility – Some monitoring tools fail to provide a holistic view across hybrid infrastructure, blind spots can emerge where vulnerabilities can evade detection and lead to increased risk.

Security gaps – Due to the hybrid cloud and modern SaaS app deployment models, the attack surface has increased. Visibility of the entire estate is essential to be able to detect and mitigate security threats and vulnerabilities.

Performance troubleshooting - With inadequate visibility into application behaviour and network flows, identifying performance issues can be challenging and take longer to resolve.

Compliance complexity - Maintaining compliance with regulations is an obstacle with disparate infrastructures. Only unified network observability can provide an overall picture. 

How Network Observability Can Boost Network Management and Security

Network observability offers organisations in-depth network monitoring to enhance performance, streamline troubleshooting processes and maintain smoother hybrid-cloud operations.

An advanced network monitoring solution provides improved visibility of the network by illuminating complexities and enabling proactive management and informed decision-making across all parts of its infrastructure, including cloud and on-premises components.

Here are some ways that network observability can help tech professionals proactively identify and address issues before they escalate and impact operations and productivity: 

Gain a centralised view across a complex network infrastructure - Get a more complete view of your network infrastructure, including cloud instances, virtual machines, containers and physical hardware. This unified perspective optimizes management, streamlines workflows and enhances operational efficiency. 

Get real-time insights - Leverage real-time visibility into network performance metrics, application health and security posture. This enables proactive issue identification and resolution, minimising downtime and optimising the end-user experience and productivity. 

Enhance your cybersecurity posture - Monitoring via real-time network observability helps detect security threats across your hybrid cloud. Having a centralised view of vulnerabilities and suspicious activities facilitates faster mitigation of issues to boost security and reduce risk. 

Deliver against compliance requirements - Network observability platforms help support compliance with government regulations and industry standards, providing detailed audit trails.

The Benefits of Real-Time Network Insights

Real-time insights into network performance can enable proactive issue resolution and minimise downtime, ultimately optimising the end-user experience. This might be quickly pinpointing the source of a network performance bottleneck or detecting a cyberattack in its initial stages before extensive damage can be done.

With real-time monitoring of network latency, traffic flows, packet information and application response times, your teams can proactively identify and resolve issues before they affect users or business operations. Benefits include: 

Reduced downtime - Downtime can have severe consequences for any business, including financial losses and damage to reputation. Network observability can help organizations minimize downtime by quickly identifying the root cause of issues so IT teams can address them.  

Improved user experience - Organizations want to deliver a smoother customer experience. By knowing how their hybrid cloud network is performing, businesses can provide more reliable and efficient customer service, resulting in increased satisfaction and a better user experience. 

Boosted cybersecurity - Cyberthreats continue to be significant, and security has become a prime concern when using hybrid-cloud environments. Network observability offers an enhanced view of the overall network security status. This helps with the early detection of anomalies and potential threats, leading to a more robust security posture. 

Better compliance and risk management - Having detailed insight into network operations through observability enhances security and aids in compliance and risk management. By using network observability to help comply with industry standards and regulations, organizations can streamline this core aspect of modern business operations. 

A culture of enhanced security and operations - Network observability helps foster an organizational culture focused on security and optimized user experience. Businesses can encourage a proactive and vigilant approach to network management by prioritizing network visibility and cybersecurity among their teams using the available real-time hybrid cloud network information.  

Confidence in Hybrid Cloud Environments

Network observability is essential for managing and securing hybrid cloud environments. It paves the path to greater security and more seamless management, playing a vital role in delivering a more secure and reliable network infrastructure. Organisations that use one of the market leaders in network observability will mitigate the complexities of hybrid cloud setups and better maintain operational excellence and cybersecurity.