SCENARIO
Organizations of all sizes have begun migrating at least some of their workloads to the public cloud (while keeping some workloads onpremises) to create a hybrid IT environment. However, many have experienced, or continue to experience, problems with their migration. According to research from Dimensional Data, half or more of the companies surveyed experienced application performance problems. Additionally, 88% of companies surveyed experienced some sort of issue with their cloud environment due to a lack of visibility into what is, and is not, happening within that environment. These issues include performance problems, service outages, missed security threats, and more.
The root of the problem is the use an “all or nothing” approach to cloud migration. Some activities are better suited for the cloud (like being able to spin new applications up and down) and others are better suited for physical on-premises (high performance and highly secure architectures with inline IPS appliances).
Use of a hybrid environment allows you to safely and securely monitor your network infrastructure, whether it is virtual-based or physical on-premises equipment based.
IXIA HYBRID VISIBILITY SOLUTIONS
Ixia’s entire portfolio of visibility solutions are optimized for a hybrid environment. CloudLens™, Ixia’s platform for public and private cloud visibility addresses the challenges of granular data access in the cloud. The platform provides a framework with which tapping and filtering abilities are scaled ondemand to meet the needs of cloud customers. Scalability, automation, and agility are what users expect in a multi-tenant, self-service model.
CloudLens SaaS™, Ixia’s public cloud solution, is the first network-level solution that provides Visibility-as-a-Service (VaaS) through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Designed from the ground up to retain the elastic scale, flexibility, and agility benefits of the cloud, CloudLens SaaS uses sensors that are installed into Docker containers. Monitoring data is captured and can then be sent to a location(s) that is part of the cloud instance or within the physical data center.
The CloudLens platform enables you to dynamically scale your cloud visibility as you scale your public cloud resources without creating an extra automation and infrastructure management burden or any configuration changes.
Network packet brokers (NPBs), such as Vision ONE, are another core component of a hybrid solution. NPBs capture, filter, deduplicate, and aggregate monitoring data before that data is sent to purpose-built tools for analysis. By using an NPB, your monitoring data is efficiently optimized. This reduces the cost and improves the efficiency of your monitoring appliances. Ixia NPBs support an interface to CloudLens that allows for cloud and physical on-premises data sharing. By backhauling key pieces of monitoring data, a single, complete view of the network can be created to optimize trouble shooting, security, performance, and compliance activities. This reduces MTTR, improves network security, and provides a coherent data set for compliance tools.
Ixia’s Hawkeye™ solution allows you to further optimize environments by using proactive monitoring in both physical and virtual environments. Latent network performance metrics can be captured to measure the performance and health of both environments. A synthetic traffic generator allows you to create the exact mix of traffic on your network and load test different configurations to determine the best performance and also catch software and configuration rollout errors before a network upgrade is initiated. The impact of software application migrations from on-premises to cloud can also be captured before the configuration changes are made, eliminating future problems. A hybrid cloud solution provides the maximum flexibility and Ixia provides complete flexibility in monitoring options.
