Out of Sight, Out of Mind: The Dangers of Ignoring Cloud Visibility

The cloud is a complicated place. There are virtual machines, containers, and microservices being used to build applications. Resources constantly spin up and spin down. Everything can change in a matter of minutes.  

All of this change and complexity can pose major challenges for securing the cloud. Without a clear understanding of how every component connects and interacts, the risk to cloud security increases dramatically.

Security teams understand the risk. In fact, research by Vanson Bourne shows that 95% of security leaders think their organization needs better ways to see cloud connections. So why aren’t the old methods of visibility working anymore, and what’s the solution?

The limitations of legacy visibility approaches

If you’re using legacy visibility tools, you’re likely not getting a complete, end-to-end view into your cloud and how it’s interacting with the rest of the network. These traditional methods can miss fast-changing cloud resources because they’re not designed to handle today's hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructures.  

Here are the key limitations of using legacy visibility tools:

1. A fixed view of the network

Traditional on-premises networks are often highly customized to support legacy and modern workloads. That means these networks change slowly. Visibility tools for traditional networks are designed to only give a snapshot of the infrastructure at a given moment. If things aren’t changing much, there’s no need to see the network in real time.

But in the cloud, things are always changing, and a fixed network view doesn't work well. Cloud visibility tools need to capture these changes as they happen. Otherwise, you’re creating blind spots in your cloud environment. This creates vulnerabilities where attackers can breach your network, hide in secret, and quietly move to your critical assets.

2. Lack of a granular view into application-level communication

Modern apps are built using microservices and containers that talk to each other across different layers and services. If you’re using legacy visibility tools, you're likely only seeing a broad view of the network.  

These tools can't capture the complex relationships and dependencies at the application level happening in the cloud. They also often miss how microservices interact within and across cloud environments.  

Without seeing how apps communicate, security teams can't fully understand data flows, making it hard to spot unusual behavior or possible threats in the cloud.

3. Overwhelming amounts of data with little context

Legacy visibility tools often produce a lot of data. But most security teams don’t have the time or resources to sift through it all, much less gain insights that can inform security priorities.

This overload can also cause false positives, where harmless activities are flagged as threats, or false negatives, where real threats are missed. The lack of context provided by these tools makes it hard to make good security decisions and respond quickly to problems.

The consequences of inadequate visibility

The stakes are high. Attackers know that less traffic flow visibility means it’s easier for them to breach the cloud and hide in its shadows.  

Without enough visibility, they can enter your network, steal sensitive data, disrupt operations, and even launch ransomware attacks, all without being noticed. This puts your organization at risk of financial losses, damage to reputation, and fines from regulators.

Security teams need full, detailed visibility to monitor, prioritize, and fix vulnerabilities.

In the cloud, visibility is not just nice to have; it's a must. Here’s why:

• Build the right segmentation policies: Without a clear, up-to-the-minute view of your cloud environment, it’s difficult to put the right security controls where you need them. End-to-end visibility means better segmentation and a more complete Zero Trust architecture.

• Proactive threat detection: With detailed visibility, security teams can spot vulnerabilities and unusual activity in real time, allowing them to act before a breach happens.  

• Better incident response: Full visibility provides the context you need to understand the size and impact of incidents. This helps teams respond and fix problems faster and more effectively – before they turn into a major security incident.

• Optimized resource use: Knowing how cloud services interact helps discover and remove unnecessary or inefficient communication that cloud providers are charging you for. This can make your team more efficient while saving you money.

• Compliance requirements: Regulations often require detailed visibility into data flows and interactions to avoid legal and financial problems.

Illumio CloudSecure: Get complete visibility across the hybrid multi-cloud

With Illumio CloudSecure, organizations get detailed visibility and control over how applications and workloads communicate. This helps contain any cloud breaches quickly and prevents them from causing serious damage.

With Illumio CloudSecure, you can:

• Gain end-to-end visibility: Using real-time data from agentless controls, you can see the traffic flows of your cloud-native apps. Understand how applications communicate, their security policies, use, access, and security risks.

• Gather insights: Use an interactive map to see application deployments, resources, traffic flows, and metadata with traffic flow logs. Learn which workloads are communicating and why they’re communicating.

• Integrate with major cloud providers: CloudSecure’s agentless approach allows you to easily integrate with cloud vendors like AWS and Azure. Extend visibility and control across multi-cloud and hybrid cloud setups — without the need for extensive customization or manual configuration.

• Share visibility and security responsibilities: Security and development teams can be on the same page with CloudSecure. Define and manage security policies alongside application code to ensure security is part of the development and deployment process.

Try Illumio CloudSecure free for 30 days — no software installation or credit card information required.  

Want to learn more? Contact us today for a free consultation and demo.