How to Gain Network Visibility in the Cloud

As more IT organizations migrate towards cloud computing, they are finding that managing this environment is particularly challenging because they lack end-to-end visibility into the network. They can see everything happening in their own network, but once the cloud service they are trying to manage needs to be extended across a network managed by a third-party service provider, everything goes dark.

To address this issue, Appneta (formerly known as Apparent Networks) announced PathView Private Cloud, which extends its PathView Cloud service to give IT organizations visibility into both their own networks and the networks of third-party service providers. Previously, Appneta gave IT organizations visibility into third-party networks, but now IT organizations can correlate that information with reports about what is happening on their own networks to better manage an IT service in the cloud, says Appneta CEO James Melvin.

Much of the debate over private versus public cloud computing comes down to the ability of the internal IT department to manage those services. Realistically, however, an internal IT organization can’t manage what it can’t see. The Pathview Cloud service allows them to see all the application traffic moving across the Layer 3 switches, which Melvin says makes it a whole lot easier to pinpoint where potential bottlenecks that are adversely affecting cloud computing performance actually lie.

There’s no doubt that internal IT organizations have a lot at stake whenever the conversation turns to cloud computing. The real issue, however, may not be the cloud itself, but rather how the IT organization actually manages anything running on it.