Cloud adoption in the Middle East, which was once restricted by data residency and security concerns, has recently seen a dramatic surge.
As the region’s digital economy advances – with governments heavily backing smart cities, digitalisation, and AI initiatives – this computing model has emerged as the preferred paradigm for public and private sector entities alike. And while the pandemic undoubtedly provided the initial impetus, it has clearly had a lasting effect, with Gartner forecasting that end-user spending on public cloud in the MENA region will reach $5.8 billion this year, representing an impressive 18.8 per cent year-on-year growth.
For many organisations, this move to the cloud has been spurred by its many benefits, including more flexibility, increased efficiency, boosted performance, and the potential for innovation and new capabilities. Yet, while the cloud promises to bolster businesses’ resiliency in a hybrid working world, most companies have a critical gap in their cloud infrastructure – observability.
Observability offers organisations the opportunity to monitor, measure and maximise application productivity before, during, and after cloud migration. Without it, migration to the cloud becomes more complex, and can result in unnecessarily high costs, damages to the end-user experience, and cybersecurity challenges. As with all potential IT challenges, the industry has risen to the task of presenting organisations with a broad set of visibility tools. This inevitably places the onus on organisations to determine which best meets their needs – an endeavour that can be daunting at the very least. Fortunately, four key criteria can aid the vetting process.
Migration Management
Migrating apps to the cloud promises to increase agility and reduce cost yet many organisations have found this to be a challenging step to take. More specifically, 51 per cent of businesses cited understanding app dependencies as the top challenge they face when it comes to cloud migration, according to ESG’s 2021 Technology Spending Intentions Survey. The research also found that the growing complexity and unpredictability of hybrid; IT makes it difficult to ensure cloud migration success.
As a result, it’s crucial that IT teams reinstate some level of observability and control when monitoring performance and ensuring a consistent user experience in the cloud — throughout the migration process and beyond. Robust application and network monitoring tools will enable IT Teams to gain visibility over solving these complex cloud migration challenges. This will empower businesses to tackle these challenges by identifying hidden risks and constraints that could result in performance issues, unexpected delays, and unplanned costs.
Uncovering Hidden Costs
Despite its rapid growth, there are still plenty of hidden costs and upsells that lie in wait for unsuspecting organisations, making cloud initiatives rather more costly than originally presumed. In fact, according to research from Flexera, organisations struggle to track and control cloud costs, estimating that 30 per cent of cloud spending is wasted.
To tackle this costing crisis, organisations need to focus on cloud flow solutions to help identify what’s driving up cloud costs. Cloud flow solutions can highlight the most expensive types of cloud data – so that efficiencies can be identified and acted upon. It enables companies to examine how much traffic is exiting the cloud, the most expensive type of cloud data and the next tier of pricing. Knowing this information will assist businesses in helping them improve planning around where data and applications should reside to gain efficiencies.
Effortless End-user Experience Monitoring
Cloud plays a central role in the digital business strategy of most enterprises. Yet, it can complicate the effort to deliver an efficient digital experience. For example, using cloud-based solutions could mean IT no longer controls the IT infrastructure on which several business-critical applications run.
Yet, most End User Experience Monitoring solutions can help address these concerns. Research from EMA’s Network Management Megatrends report found that 34 per cent of IT operations say that End User Experience Monitoring is the most important means for measuring success. Therefore, it’s a crucial investment for IT Teams, as it enables them to monitor the impact of application and device performance from the end-user’s point-of-view. This, in turn, will help organisations deliver a superior end-user experience.
Supporting Cybersecurity
Concerns about cloud security are rising. AWS’ Cloud Security Report revealed that 95 per cent of cybersecurity professionals are extremely to moderately concerned about this, up from 91 per cent in the previous survey. Whilst there’s no doubt that the cloud brings tremendous technological advancement and flexibility, plus it opens new business opportunities for growth, it can also have severe consequences if it’s not secured and controlled properly. The famous saying still applies – You can’t secure what you don’t know. The main challenge of any cloud is how much the Security Operations Centre (SOC) teams know its architecture, mechanism and users’ access.
For any organisation to achieve greater security benefits of its cloud investment, SOC teams need to make sure they can see what they need to protect in the form of greater visibility into cloud resources. Security teams should not look at cloud visibility from the cloud platform perspective but extend that into the endpoint behaviours and activity.
Having the right visibility will reduce risks, so security teams need to investigate using a Network Behaviour Analysis Engine (NBAE), which can benchmark abnormal user access behaviours to a baseline and proactively alert on any change due to zero days threats. Cloud access is one of the major concerns and issues to when it comes to cloud deployment since users can be anywhere, so the SOC teams need to stay on top of who’s doing what, when and from where.
In addition, having the right visibility in place speeds up the threat response, as cloud visibility is the first critical milestone in reacting to any type of incidents, whether Security or Performance. Combining visibility and automation becomes a strong weapon for SOC to speed up incident response via highly granular data gathering and actionable insights.
Visible Benefits Ahead
The cloud momentum we’re witnessing is only set to grow as an increasing number of organisations turn to the technology to drive digitalisation, innovation, and, ultimately, their bottom lines. Visibility will underpin the success of these cloud initiatives, and organisations that make the right decision regarding this critical investment will see rapid and tangible returns.
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