Approximately 94% of enterprises use the cloud to some degree in their operations. 48% have shown to store their most data on the cloud while half of business workloads run in the cloud. More than 90% of businesses use more than one cloud system as well. 

Currently, there is over one exabyte of data stored in the cloud with market leaders like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud capturing the majority of market share. This is equivalent to over a billion gigabytes of data, over 67 million iPhones worth of data, and 50,000 trees made into paper and printed. Even with this growth, nearly 80% of organizations report widening visibility gaps in their cloud infrastructure and lack of visibility across their cloud operations. 

Modern cloud tools don’t deliver an end-to-end picture while most cloud monitoring tools focus on only one service. More specifically, there is limited visibility with what’s happening on cloud-based platforms as they are generally limited to as-necessary retrieval in a tight window. Furthermore, few cloud platforms provide packet-based monitoring tools even though 86% of IT professionals believe such level of visibility is important for network and application performance. Basic tools aren’t able to handle the evolving complexities of modern cloud architectures as well. 

Other poor cloud visibility issues include native cloud tools mainly focusing on developers and cloud engineers with very little useful information for network engineers to understand issues with connection or performance or to even use the tools to their full potential. There is also difficulty in getting a holistic picture across an entire network, interfering with tracking users, applications, and more. Plus, cloud monitoring tools are more often centered on security rather than the bigger picture, meaning you need to purchase multiple tools to be able to see everything, adding to tool sprawl and operating expenses. As a result, about half of all companies are seeing performance suffering. 

Limited visibility leads to limited functionality. This means greater security risks, lack of support for remote workers, poor migration support for several functions, tech stack inflation, and limited cost or consumption visibility. All of these problems culminate into a number of critical blindspots, such as delays in troubleshooting application/network performance, application slowdowns and outages, inability to maintain data privacy or defend against security attacks, inability to monitor performance workflows, and more. Now, more than 80% of organizations are working on raising their investments in cloud monitoring and cloud visibility. 

Advanced monitoring solutions provide end-to-end visibility across organizations’ entire connected network. This allows for better security against risks in the form of 50% fewer end-user device security incidents. This also means there is lower mean time to resolution (MTTR). Cloud monitoring helps increase business value as most decision-makers see a direct link between cloud visibility and business value. Organizations typically see 30% of cloud infrastructure costs wasted, so good monitoring helps expose utilization and costs. 

Being able to effectively monitor your organization's cloud operations can help reduce major blind spots while better supporting your business.