In today’s digital landscape, cloud computing has become an integral part of business operations. With the rise of remote work and the need for scalable and flexible solutions, more organizations are turning to cloud environments or a SaaS security platform to meet their IT needs.
As the number of applications, services, and integrations within a cloud environment increases, so does the level of complexity. This can make it challenging for CISOs and IT managers to maintain visibility over their entire infrastructure.
Why Fragmented Data Makes Monitoring Hard
Fragmented monitoring systems are not built; they are developed over time, often as different teams within an organization choose different monitoring systems to monitor different services or applications.
Historically, monitoring systems are not built to handle today’s complex environments, where containers are spinning up and down, services are communicating between regions, and third-party services are playing an integral part of the workflow. When something goes wrong, trying to diagnose the root cause of the problem across multiple monitoring systems can be time-consuming, time that can be critical when dealing with a security incident.
The Case for Centralized Observability
Centralized observability systems are built to alleviate this problem, providing a unified view of log, metrics, and trace data, so that IT and security teams can correlate events across the entire application stack from one place.
The difference between monitoring and observability should be noted. While monitoring will inform you that something is wrong, observability will allow you to know why. This is especially valuable to CISOs, as they have to quickly determine the scope of an incident, not just detect it.
The process of building out a central observability platform will require standardization of data collection from services, the use of open standards like OpenTelemetry, and ensuring that the data pipeline is robust enough to handle the high-volume environment without introducing latency.
Long-Term Benefits Beyond Troubleshooting
The value of observability compounds over time. Security teams will have a more accurate representation of normal activity, making it easier to detect abnormal activity. Compliance reports will also be easier, as they will be structured and readily available in the central location.
The benefits of mean time to resolution will also compound over time. Operationally, the speed of resolving issues will directly translate to reducing downtime and lowering the cost of incidents. Less time will be spent investigating issues and more time will be spent improving processes.
Build Visibility Before You Need It
The companies that manage the complexities of the cloud environment best are those that have built out their observability infrastructure before they need it. This is because, to the CISO or IT manager of a growing cloud environment, centralizing observability is one of the highest-leverage actions they can take to improve their security and resilience!
