Cloud migration success with NETSCOUT

Bryan Hamman, Regional Director at NETSCOUT

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Migrating to the cloud offers corporate organisations greater agility, enabling companies to create new services, update and roll out applications faster, and introduce alternative ways to communicate with customers. However, migrating to the cloud, and operating within this space, brings its own challenges.

This is according to Ray Krug, solutions architect at NETSCOUT, a leading provider of service assurance, security and business analytics. According to a NETSCOUT blog, Krug notes that gaining visibility across on-premises and cloud environments is one area that has been historically difficult.

He explains that, for example, an application may be talking to a database or an ancillary application downstream, and unless you understand and fully account for those dependencies, you might fail to migrate certain critical components, which will then have a ripple effect that impacts on other business processes.

NETSCOUT products and solutions are distributed throughout Africa by value-added distributor, Networks Unlimited Africa.

Bryan Hamman, Regional Director at NETSCOUT, adds: “Before your enterprise migrates to the cloud, you need to develop a strategy that includes common challenges associated with cloud migration.”

Hamman outlines some of these challenges as follows:

• Factoring in cost analysis, projected downtime, employee training, an estimated time to complete the migration, and the cost of rewriting or replacing data to be compatible with the cloud architecture;
• Breaking down your cloud migration into stages;
• Maintaining application visibility in a hybrid cloud; and
• Considering security as a top priority, especially when integrating new technologies.

“Visibility is critical to a migration,” explains Hamman, “particularly when using a ‘rehost’ approach. In order to understand how an application performs, its dependencies and what ports it uses, granular, process-level visibility is required. Similarly, detailed visibility is required after the migration to ensure the app is operating as expected.”

From a visibility perspective, Krug clarifies that wire, or packet, data is the key to fully understanding how everything communicates, explaining: “The challenge with wire data is that it’s hard to interpret. NETSCOUT has solved that problem by utilising patented Adaptive Service Intelligence technology, which translates wire data into meaningful key performance metrics, also known as actionable, smart data. Our nGeniusONE analytics platform then takes the metadata and allows us to display service dependency maps.”

In essence, Krug clarifies that NETSCOUT provides the ability to discover the dependencies as well as the performance of applications and the network.

According to NETSCOUT, starting with wire data has several major advantages, including the fact that, regardless of whether you are using a hybrid on-premises/cloud or multi-cloud model, wire data is everywhere.

Krug concludes: “Whether it’s workloads in the cloud, private cloud or data centre, we deliver visibility end to end. And that visibility is the key to migration success.”

Please contact Janco Taljaard at janco.taljaard@nu.co.za for more information.