The Perils of Navigating Cloud Migrations with Eyes Wide Shut

The Perils of Navigating Cloud Migrations with Eyes Wide Shut

Scalable observability is imperative to assure network performance and security.

In today's modern digitally transformed environments, enterprises have fully embraced the importance of migrating workloads to the cloud. A 2024 survey of more than 740 tech professionals and IT leaders found that 58 percent of businesses planned to migrate more workloads to the cloud this year-up from 44 percent last year.

While this trend portends tremendous promise for the businesses conducting such migrations, the complexity of these operations is fraught with peril. Moving from one technology to a new one, or moving a legacy application to a new application as in an upgrade, or migrating to a new platform presents real challenges for IT organizations.

IT professionals are not the only ones concerned about these migrations. Senior leadership has a lot riding on the success of transformation efforts, having made significant investments in technology. Staying on schedule and on budget, along with achieving important goals, such as being able to introduce new services and products more quickly, are key to remaining competitive. Achieving all of this while maintaining business continuity is understandably a tall order.

The ultimate goal for IT is ensuring that before, during, and after migration activities user experience and network and application performance does not suffer.

Observability Is Key for Successful Migrations

Migrations present considerable risks for any enterprise. When workloads are maintained in a private data center, IT has complete control. Teams can observe traffic and easily scale performance management as needed. But as applications and services move to co-los and multicloud environments, that level of control is greatly diminished. Third-party vendors are now involved, relying on their own monitoring tools that can't deliver end-through-end visibility.

Because of the growing complexity of today's networks, IT is unable to gain visibility into performance and application dependencies, as well as enabling services. True observability-that extends across borders-is needed in order to maintain, analyze, and improve the user experience.

For many IT organizations, the tools they are using for observing the network are somewhat outdated. They simply aren't well suited for monitoring modern digitally transformed networks. As a result, gaps in visibility exist, leaving IT unable to track service levels and user experience in the new environment. Reliance on vendor monitoring tools has its own shortcomings because those tools have a narrow focus and lack an overall ecosystem view of what is happening throughout the transaction.

The Virtue of Deep Packet Inspection-based Monitoring

IT would be well-advised to take a deliberate observability approach that relies on deep packet inspection (DPI)-based monitoring. Only packets can reveal the true source of problems end-through-end. Point tools, particularly those offered by vendors, are just too limiting.

This is especially important when migrating workloads, regardless of whether upgrading to a private cloud, putting applications into a public cloud, adopting new software-as-a-service (SaaS) or unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solutions, or rolling out a new upgrade from multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) to software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN). All require visibility before the migration in order to make the best business decisions, plan appropriately for it, and then evaluate during and afterward.

Using a single, vendor-independent tool that monitors and analyzes traffic via DPI at scale is by far the best approach. Such a packet-based analysis solution looks at the packets, analyzes them with rich detail, and then provides key performance indicators-offering a source of truth that can't be manipulated as in some other approaches. Packets have proven exceptionally good for monitoring the performance of the applications themselves, as well as the service dependencies across the entire network, providing a clear snapshot into when and where problems are occurring and offering a quicker path to resolving them.

By gaining the ability to look at your own network, it becomes possible to map an effective observability strategy for your digitally transformed environment. Smarter observability leads to smarter analytics, which allows IT to find the problem and then solve it, rather than simply ruling out a problem. When IT is only able to rule out part of a network, inevitable finger-pointing in the war room occurs, potentially lasting for days or even weeks without resolving the actual problem. This situation is exacerbated during an expensive, high-visibility migration, such as lifting and shifting an application to the cloud.

Smart Observability for Smart Data Analytics

As we have said before, incomplete data leads to incomplete analysis. Only NETSCOUT has what we call Visibility Without Borders, offering end-through-end observability throughout the entire network. This vendor-independent monitoring solution analyzes packet data, delivering NETSCOUT Smart Data that is well-structured, contextual, and available in real time. Smart Data provides actionable performance insights throughout the ecosystem, empowering IT to accurately identify problems and reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR).

NETSCOUT solutions offer scalable observability for exceptional performance and user experience throughout migrations. This enables you to make good business decisions and grow into your new environment.

Learn more about how you can improve observability within your network infrastructure by watching this insightful webinar series.