Reduce Mean Time to Innocence with Hop by Hop Visibility

Most enterprises today have multiple cloud migration projects underway or in the planning stages. By moving more on-premises applications and data to third-party cloud platforms and accelerating digital transformation, these organizations look to support remote or hybrid workforce collaboration, serve customers more effectively, increase business agility and resilience, reduce costs, and more.

While the potential benefits of cloud migrations are significant, these complex IT projects are tough to execute and optimize. They’re made even more challenging and costly due to the lack of visibility that network and security teams have across the organization’s cloud estate, which typically includes multiple cloud platforms running and hundreds or even thousands of apps.

So, when a performance issue arises between the on-premises environment and the cloud, or between clouds, it can take teams a long time to prove network innocence before they can even start to resolve the issue with their cloud providers. Whether addressing a performance issue or an outright outage, time is money, and fast resolution is imperative for business continuity and positive customer experiences.

No More Troubleshooting in the Dark

Your network and security teams’ struggle to understand what’s happening across your cloud estate is due largely to a lack of appropriate tools. The tools they use to validate connectivity and security for on-premises networking are completely different from those used for the cloud — and between clouds.

Cloud topology is also represented much differently from on-premises topology.

Cloud Providers do not share nomenclature

Complicating matters further: Cloud providers use their own nomenclature, methodology, visualization, and toolset. And when virtual machines are thrown into the mix, visibility effectively drops off a cliff. Provider tools can visualize traffic up to a virtual device, such as a Palo Alto Networks L7 firewall, but once the packets enter the firewall, there’s no information on how they were manipulated by the device and where they subsequently went.

The Forward Enterprise platform from Forward Networks helps your teams overcome these challenges by providing a clear visualization of your cloud estate alongside your on-premises environment in a single normalized view. That view includes your entire cloud inventory — every instance and object associated with every provider — and how those objects relate to and interact with each other and where they’re located, including geographically. At a glance, you can see what’s happening now and over time in your cloud environment.

Anytime you want to explore more information about a specific element within your network, like a cloud platform, firewall or transit gateway, you can just click on that element in Forward Enterprise. For example, clicking on a platform in your environment from a major cloud provider, like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure, could show that you have four virtual private cloud instances (VPCs), one transit VPC, and several subnets related to that platform.

Detailed Information about multi-cloud resources is always available

The Forward Enterprise platform offers hop-by-hop visibility, from access points through multi-cloud, allowing your teams to get granular when troubleshooting cloud performance issues. They can determine exactly how, and how effectively, traffic is moving between your on-premises environment and any instance in your cloud environment, and between points within your multi-cloud environment.

Your teams can quickly identify problems and issue tickets to appropriate teams to investigate and resolve problems. They can also confirm that redundancy and availability are meeting expectations. And they can verify the security posture between zones, both on-premises and in the cloud.