The Cloud Conundrum: Navigating Operational Hurdles and Expense Pitfalls

By Bryan Ashley, VP of Product Marketing, Aviatrix

The cloud is increasingly essential for organizations today. It represents one of the most powerful transformational drivers, enabling enterprises to innovate and best competitors. In fact, according to research from Flexera, 89% of organizations use multiple clouds in their operations. The accelerated push for a robust cloud strategy is amplified further by the increased adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). AI produces massive volumes of reference data, which the cloud’s exceptional processing power can help manage. While it is crucial to remain steadfast in cloud enablement (especially if they are adopting AI-powered technologies), there are several challenges businesses must address to ensure success – notably, operational inefficiency and hidden costs.  

Operational Inefficiencies That Arise from Poor Visibility

Networks continue to grow in scale and sophistication, with the rise in cloud services, remote work, and edge computing contributing greatly to this ever-mounting complexity. Such intricacy demands visibility to help identify traffic bottlenecks, bandwidth issues, and idle resources to uphold optimal performance and minimal latency. Network visibility is also critical to reducing vulnerabilities, uncovering blind spots, and supporting other cybersecurity efforts. Nevertheless, due to the structure of typical cloud services, many organizations lack visibility into network traffic flows. As a result, they cannot ascertain the health of those flows, the source of latency and other critical information. Ultimately, this lack of visibility hinders operational efficacy.

The visibility issue worsens when enterprises operate across multiple cloud networks. Within multi-cloud environments, which are highly prevalent today, IT teams need diverse telemetry and network observability to monitor application traffic over different networks, whether the company owns or does not own them. However, achieving such visibility is easier said than done, and, on many occasions, businesses have few ways of uncovering performance problems. Moreover, each service in a multi-cloud environment has its own set of parameters and protocols concerning data transfer, security, etc., making it quite cumbersome to stitch all these services together.

The Hidden Costs of Cloud and Multi-Cloud Environments

Another obstacle that enterprises must overcome to maximize the success of their cloud strategy is related to cost. Typical cloud service providers’ cost structures are difficult to understand and inflexible. Because the cloud services own the underlay (infrastructure) and overlay (visibility) of the network, they charge users for data processing and egress to pay for their infrastructure in addition to storage and computing fees. In particular, egress fees can be quite hefty. Sometimes referred to as bandwidth or data transfer fees, cloud service providers charge egress fees whenever data gets moved out of cloud storage and onto the Internet.

What makes egress fees such a headache is that they are usually unknown to organizations because they lack visibility or insight into how data packets are transferred (i.e., from the cloud to the data center, back to the cloud, then to another cloud, etc.). Egress fees get billed after data leaves cloud storage and enters the Internet; as a result, IT personnel might not realize how much expenses accumulated until it has gone way over budget. Likewise, egress fees are difficult to predict because cloud service providers use different methodologies and tiered pricing. For these reasons, egress fees are often called “hidden costs.” Organizations cannot afford to allow egress fees to run wild and must implement a solution that can reliably track these costs.

How an Integrated Cloud Networking Solution Can Overcome These Challenges

Enterprises can achieve greater visibility to minimize operational challenges and avoid hefty egress fees by utilizing an integrated cloud networking solution. An ideal integrated cloud networking solution will institute an overlay that spans the entire multi-cloud (or single-cloud) network, providing total visibility. By using this overlay, businesses don’t have to worry about data packets going in and out of different cloud services, drastically reducing data processing and egress fees. Some integrated cloud networking solution providers don’t even charge egress fees.

Integrated cloud networking solutions enable organizations to consolidate networking, management, and automation, boosting visibility, security, and control. Specifically, best-in-class integrated cloud networking solutions will act as a single interface or pane-of-glass that improves the IT team’s visibility and deepens their understanding of multi-cloud networks, allowing them to monitor traffic effectively and troubleshoot issues efficiently. This enhanced visibility and better network management ultimately safeguards operational performance while improving migration efforts. Similarly, leading integrated cloud networking solutions have in-built telemetry, giving technical personnel an accurate breakdown of accounts or subscriptions displayed on a single interface.

Maximizing the Cloud’s Potential  

The cloud has become a foundation of business success in the modern age – especially for AI adoption and peripheral technologies enablement. Nevertheless, traditional cloud networking approaches can lead to operational shortcomings and hefty fees. As such, organizations must think differently and embrace an integrated cloud networking solution that can boost operational efficiency and safeguard the bottom line.

About The Author

Bryan Ashley is Vice President of Product Management at Aviatrix (https://www.aviatrix.com), the pioneer of Intelligent Cloud Networking™, where he provides best practices and guidance for enterprises leveraging cloud environments. He has more than 20 years of experience in cloud networking and network security. Prior to Aviatrix, Ashley worked as a Global Black Belt for Microsoft Azure, supporting strategic enterprise customers on their cloud journey.