With more data than ever residing on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud, the amount of visibility that most IT organizations have into network traffic as it moves in and out of AWS is at best limited.
Aiming to provide much needed visibility into that traffic, Gigamon has generally made available a Gigamon Visibility Platform for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud that enables IT organizations to deploy a standard network tap on AWS to make it possible to inspect content as it moves between AWS and other IT environments.
Ananda Rajagopal, vice president of product line management for Gigamon, says now that AWS and other public clouds have essentially become another tier of enterprise computing, it’s become apparent that IT organizations need visibility into the networks that connect their extended enterprises together.
Public cloud service providers will generally make available tools to analyze what’s occurring inside their environments. But Rajagopal says everything at the data and application levels is primarily the responsibility of an internal IT organization.
“There’s starting to be more clarity of roles,” says Rajagopal.
The challenge is that most IT organizations don’t want to have to deploy separate network management tools for the cloud and on-premises IT environments. By adding support for AWS, Rajagopal says Gigamon is now extending the reach of its monitoring tools into the public cloud.
As enterprise IT continues to mature in the age of the cloud, it’s clear that IT organizations are starting to view cloud service providers as simply another IT platform that needs to be supported. The issue most of them face is figuring out how best to go about accomplishing that task.