How limited network visibility impedes digital transformation

The role of visibility in modern networks

Digital transformation reshapes how companies rely on their networks. Networks no longer have clear perimeters. In the past, companies had the visibility they needed. They learned how traffic flowed by monitoring their on-premises data centers and relying on a small number of fixed observation points.

Now that enterprises are moving to the cloud, apps and services mostly run in a distributed environment. Areas of operation typically include Kubernetes clusters across private on-premises infrastructure, multiple public cloud providers and software-defined WAN edge locations.

Hybrid work has further expanded this framework. In just a single second, a transaction can traverse different environments that could be owned and monitored by separate IT teams. This adds complexity to the overall network security posture, making true end-to-end monitoring difficult. The consequences directly undermine digital transformation goals.

Some of the most damaging network visibility issues enterprises face today include the following:

1. Application performance declines

Applications that power businesses are only as reliable as the networks used to deliver them. When network visibility is fragmented, IT teams struggle to understand how applications perform in real time. Applications could experience unique slowdowns that go undetected until an end-user complaint signals the issue.

Finding the root causes of these performance degradations can be difficult due to the multiple connected paths in the system. This delays time-to-market, strains resources and negatively affects revenue generation.

2. Security blind spots

Transformation inherently grows the attack surface. New tools introduce new entry points and the potential of malicious payloads. But security teams can't protect what they can't observe. Limited network visibility opens the door to attackers who can move laterally across environments undetected. Companies need to roll out comprehensive network visibility and monitoring tools to gain insight into traffic, establish baselines, detect malicious actors and identify identity theft in a timely manner.

A breach could halt a digital transformation plan entirely. When IT teams redirect engineering efforts toward remediations, it stalls the overall roadmap. Undetected breaches dramatically increase regulatory exposure, remediation costs and reputational damage. Network visibility assurance is an integral part of network security.

2. UX issues

Users often don't know the difference between a network problem and an app bug because they both produce the same result: unusable software. Network visibility helps the team identify which layer is responsible. In a distributed network, issues span multiple segments. A network problem could be anything from packet loss at a cloud provider's egress point to elevated latency in a critical region.

Without complete traffic data across all segments, problems like these are impossible to triage. User complaints are the first signal of network performance degradation, which can damage trust and lead to productivity losses.

4. Major decisions made based on assumptions

IT leaders can't make network investment decisions without comprehensive network performance data. Otherwise, management is forced to make educated guesses, which could lead to over-provisioning the wrong bottlenecks to compensate for uncertainty. Decisions can also get delayed until after problems become acute. Mistakes made early on often become expensive corrections later.

5. Increased troubleshooting complexity

Fragmented visibility prevents application and security teams from having a full view of performance or security. Even seemingly straightforward troubleshooting can consume significant time and resources. Network teams end up spending more time diagnosing network issues when the root cause is a lack of telemetry.

6. Cloud and hybrid initiatives lose momentum

Cloud migration, multi-cloud adoption and hybrid networking underpin most enterprise digital transformation strategies. Yet each introduces visibility challenges unlike anything organizations have had to manage before. Left unattended, it can stall digital transformation.

How to improve network visibility for digital transformation

Network teams should ensure they have adequate visibility before undertaking a digital transformation project. Ways to improve network visibility include the following:

1. Adopt a unified observability app for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. While monitoring identifies the failures, observability shows how it failed. Modern observability tools provide comprehensive real-time visibility into application performance, operational health and resource utilization across hybrid environments.
2. Invest in network mapping and topology tools. Network mapping tools can automatically help detect hardware -- such as routers, switches and servers -- and create diagrams showing how they interact. Because the cloud is dynamic, continuous discovery is necessary to keep maps up to date as new deployments occur.
3. Build a security-aware visibility architecture. Both the networking and security teams should be using security frameworks to identify loopholes in security tooling and reduce the effects of limited network visibility.

Wisdom Ekpotu is a DevOps engineer and technical writer focused on building infrastructure with cloud-native technologies.