30 Jun 2023

Addressing blind spots in the hybrid cloud (Guest blog from Gigamon)

Author: Mark Jow, Field CTO EMEA, Gigamon

With the rapid growth of the hybrid cloud market, businesses are experiencing numerous benefits. According to Cisco, for example, 42 percent of organisations believe they achieve a more agile and scalable development environment within the hybrid cloud.

However, security has emerged as a significant challenge. In a recent survey conducted by Gigamon, we found that 90 percent of IT and Security leaders across EMEA, APAC and the US have experienced a data breach in the last 18 months. We also uncovered that over 70 percent of IT security leaders admit they allow encrypted data to flow freely across their IT infrastructure. It seems therefore that there’s an industry-wide lack of awareness about blind spots and the complexity and risks in maintaining security in hybrid cloud environments.

CISOs and their teams are embracing deep observability to provide complete visibility across their entire infrastructure.

How to identify blind spots

Going back to the basics, blind spots are areas within a hybrid cloud infrastructure that are not adequately reached by traditional security and monitoring tools. These areas remain hidden from view, hindering effective data collection and analysis and therefore compromising security.

The good news is that IT and Security professionals are increasingly becoming aware of the importance of avoiding blind spots: our research uncovered that unexpected blind spots being exploited are a major concern to CISOs. To address this concern, CISOs and their teams are embracing deep observability to provide complete visibility across their entire infrastructure. This is achieved by harnessing immutable, precise and actionable network-derived intelligence to amplify the power of existing tools, eliminating blind spots both on-premise and in the cloud, providing greater visibility and understanding of an organisation’s security posture and potential threats.

Encrypted traffic and limited visibility

Yet there is still work to be done. There’s a huge underestimation of blind spots and what these consist of, considering only 30 percent of organisations have visibility into encrypted traffic. Moreover, 35 percent of respondents reported limited visibility into containers, and less than half (48 percent) had visibility of east-to-west traffic, which involves the lateral movement of data within the hybrid cloud infrastructure. These limitations further contribute to the existence of unobserved segments in the hybrid cloud.

By leveraging actionable network-derived intelligence, businesses can amplify the power of existing security and observability tools and gain comprehensive visibility of their complete hybrid cloud estate.

The impact of unrecognised blind spots

As a result, nearly one-third of breaches go undetected by IT and Security professionals and their tools, with even higher percentages in the US (48 percent) and Australia (52 percent). The failure to recognise blind spots significantly hampers the ability to effectively protect sensitive data and respond to security incidents. While surface-level confidence appears high, with 94 percent of global respondents to our survey believing their security tools provide complete visibility, it’s clear this perception is simply not the reality of hybrid cloud security.

The hybrid cloud is inherently complex, and traditional security and monitoring tools are often insufficient in addressing blind spots in this area. To effectively eliminate blind spots and narrow the perception vs. reality gap in hybrid cloud security, CISOs and their teams must actively prioritise deep observability. By leveraging actionable network-derived intelligence, businesses can amplify the power of existing security and observability tools and gain comprehensive visibility of their complete hybrid cloud estate.

Implementing deep observability will significantly accelerate progress in improving visibility into containers, east-west traffic and encrypted data to bolster security and totally eradicate the blind spots that are keeping todays CISOs up at night.