Cloud visibility: Definition, importance and challenges

Why is cloud visibility important for businesses?

In today's competitive landscape, cloud visibility isn't just a nice-to-have -- it helps businesses make informed, strategic decisions. It gives them complete control over their cloud infrastructure, driving security and efficiency. With real-time insights into resource usage, performance and potential risks, organizations can proactively optimize costs, prevent security breaches and ensure strict compliance with industry regulations. Every design decision in a system includes tradeoffs, so these choices should aim to maximize benefits and minimize drawbacks in alignment with the business's priorities.

Core elements of cloud visibility

To achieve cloud visibility, there are three cloud usage components to consider including costs, security and access. All these components are essential for businesses to effectively manage their cloud environment and maximize value.

Cloud cost visibility

Infrastructure as a service offers cost savings through flexibility, providing adaptable resources and pricing, so businesses only paid for exactly what was needed at a given time. However, a 2022 KPMG technology survey found that 66% of business leaders report that cloud computing has yet to save money.

Cloud cost visibility helps companies see exactly how much they spend on cloud resources and identify which components drive those costs. With this insight, businesses can track their cloud expenses and adjust to prioritize spending on the most critical areas. This is particularly crucial in today's economic climate, where many companies are trying to reduce costs wherever possible.

Cloud security visibility

Cloud security visibility enables monitoring and understanding security posture, threats and vulnerabilities within cloud environments in real time. This visibility can be broken down into understanding the landscape and activity.

Landscape visibility is primarily concerned with what the cloud environment looks like and its designed scope and scale, including component configuration and compliance with any security regulations.

Activity visibility is concerned with what is happening within the environment, such as current traffic conditions, active threats and security events. All organizations will require some balance of both landscape and activity visibility tools.

Cloud access visibility

Threats to data security don't only come from malicious external actors. Cloud access visibility enables businesses to monitor the activities of internal users within the cloud system and to detect suspicious patterns. This involves tracking who is accessing cloud resources, what actions they are performing and ensuring compliance with data sovereignty and security policies.

Causes of poor cloud visibility

Achieving clear visibility in cloud environments can be challenging due to several factors that obscure the full picture. The following issues make it difficult for organizations to gain comprehensive insight into their cloud usage and performance:

• Data source fragmentation. Cloud environments consist of multiple components and applications, each with its own log stream -- the most common source of visibility data. Sifting through the astronomical number of logs for all these layers combined would be impossible for a human, so efficient filters and prioritization are needed so that the most essential information is not lost in the noise.
• Complex cloud configurations. Hybrid cloud configurations are the most used cloud strategy, aiming to capitalize on the best of both worlds -- cloud and on premises. A unified visibility of the entire hybrid system is ideal; however, on-premises systems typically have completely different architectures, technologies and even geographical locations than public clouds. The visibility tools that work for on-premises may not integrate well with public cloud visibility tools.
• Cloud service provider restrictions. Each public cloud provider has proprietary native monitoring tools designed to optimize and monitor only its own infrastructure. These tools -- such as AWS CloudWatch or Azure Monitor -- focus on metrics and data formats unique to their environments. Cloud providers compete to create distinctive service offerings and unique tools and may have limited motivation to prioritize integration with competitors' tools. For example, while Azure can use AWS and Google Cloud Platform data to provide some multi-cloud cost visibility, it does not allow a user to adjust or optimize AWS or GCP resources via Azure tools.

Features to look for in a cloud visibility tool

When selecting a cloud visibility tool, businesses should consider the following features that support comprehensive monitoring, security, cost management and compliance across cloud environments:

• Multi-cloud network monitoring. As organizations increasingly adopt multi-cloud strategies, a single tool to monitor multiple clouds becomes crucial. Multi-cloud network monitoring simplifies cloud management by consolidating data from multiple clouds into a unified view for enhanced security and operational efficiency.
• Application performance monitoring. Cloud application performance monitoring tracks application environment metrics such as response times, error rates and resource usage, providing insights into application behavior across distributed architectures.
• Container monitoring. Containers are an intrinsic part of dynamic, large-scale cloud deployments. Container monitoring provides efficient resource allocation and scalability, optimizing performance as workloads change.
• Threat monitoring. Threat monitoring involves continuously tracking cloud environments for suspicious activities, vulnerabilities or malicious behaviors. Using automated detection tools and real-time alerts ensures that potential security threats are identified and addressed quickly to protect cloud resources and data.
• Identity and access management integrations. IAM integrations ensure that user identities, roles and access permissions across cloud resources are securely managed and monitored. By integrating IAM with cloud visibility tools, organizations can track who has access to what resources, detect anomalies in access patterns and enforce policies to prevent unauthorized access.
• Security information and event management and log management capabilities. SIEM and log management capabilities in cloud visibility enable real-time monitoring and analysis of security events across cloud environments by analyzing log data. These tools help detect security threats, streamline incident response and ensure compliance by providing centralized visibility into cloud activities and potential vulnerabilities.
• Cost optimization and forecasting key performance indicators (KPIs). Any cloud cost management tool should be able to track and improve cloud resource efficiency by identifying underutilized services, reducing waste and optimizing usage patterns. This data can then be used to create KPIs so organizations can predict future cloud spending trends, ensuring better budget management and proactive financial planning for cloud operations.
• AI and machine learning-enabled insights and troubleshooting. Cloud visibility tools that use machine learning algorithms can proactively diagnose problems, optimize resource allocation and predict potential risks or outages. By using AI-driven troubleshooting, organizations can resolve cloud performance or security issues faster and more accurately.
• Regulatory compliance support. Depending on the industry or location of a system's users, a business's software and data management must comply with relevant industry or government regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or System and Organization Controls 2. Any cloud environment needs a visibility tool that enforces compliance policies, reducing the risk of legal penalties and data breaches while providing transparency and assurance to clients, demonstrating that their data is being handled securely and within regulatory standards.

Cloud visibility tool providers

Businesses rely on a variety of specialized platforms to manage cloud resources, ensure data security, control costs and monitor performance. The following are some cloud visibility tool providers that offer insight and management capabilities for cloud environments. These tools were selected because of their top performance in the Q4 Forrester Wave report, high reviews in the Gartner Peer Insights for Cloud Financial Management Tools and Cloud Security Posture Management Tools, and highest weighted reviews on G2 for Cloud Infrastructure monitoring software.

IBM Cloudability by Apptio is a FinOps platform that supports multi-cloud, hybrid and software as a service (SaaS) environments. Cloudability monitors cloud environments, cloud applications, and containers and merges observations with business goals. Cloudability integrates seamlessly with other popular visibility tools. The Q4 Forrester Wave Report named IBM Cloudability among its Leaders in Cloud Cost Management and Optimization, calling it "the most complete full-stack CCMO solution."

For businesses that deal with data-intensive applications, Anodot is an AI-based platform that specializes in real-time anomaly detection and analytics for large volumes of data. It uses machine learning algorithms to autonomously monitor data streams and identify anomalies across various metrics, such as sales, user activity, performance and system health. The platform is designed to provide fast, actionable insights without the need for manual configuration or threshold setting. Anodot provides proactive, automated insights to identify issues before they escalate.

Prisma Cloud is a comprehensive cloud security platform developed by Palo Alto Networks, designed to protect cloud-native applications and infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It provides features such as threat detection, compliance monitoring, access visibility and vulnerability management to ensure security across containers, serverless environments and cloud workloads.

SolarWinds offers a suite of cloud observability tools for both cloud and on-premises systems. It provides flexibility with self-hosted and SaaS options that leverage AIOps for holistic analysis and monitoring of complex systems.

4 tips to improve cloud visibility

With the increasing adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud setups, many businesses face challenges in fully understanding and managing their cloud operations. Here are some tips for businesses to enhance their cloud visibility.

• Invest in cloud training. When adopting a hybrid cloud environment, ensure the workforce is well-informed on building and managing cloud resources and using cloud visibility tools effectively.
• Embrace FinOps. Optimize cloud spend by adopting a DevOps and finance cross-functional strategy -- or FinOps -- to combine engineering and financial understanding to best predict and manage cloud spending.
• Chart cloud landscape. Landscape cloud security visibility tools can help chart cloud assets by automatically discovering and mapping resources across environments, providing visibility into asset locations, configurations and dependencies. They use continuous monitoring to detect changes in assets, enabling real-time inventory and tracking of cloud resources as they scale or migrate. This insight helps organizations manage security and compliance by discovering misconfigurations and identifying the attack surface.
• Create effective logs. Make sure that the applications written in-house are following best practices for logging information, such as writing meaningful logs that are correctly leveled, prioritized and structured in a way that can be easily consumed by log management tools.