How Cisco and CDW Help IT Teams Build a Resilient Hybrid Cloud

Cloud sprawl refers to the uncoordinated growth of cloud services, often resulting from a lack of centralized management or strategy. In a hybrid infrastructure, IT teams are susceptible to cloud sprawl because they simultaneously manage several cloud services with different monitoring tools.

The presence of multiple tools and different control planes may lead to an unchecked, sprawling cloud environment.

This affects an organization's ability to maintain a resilient infrastructure and burdens IT teams with:

• Increased costs: Duplicate services and underutilized resources drive up expenses and reduce financial predictability.
• Operational inefficiencies: Fragmented systems and tools hinder workflows and make it harder to operate seamlessly.
• Reduced visibility and control: Siloed data and scattered resources complicate monitoring and decision-making.

Organizations must adopt suitable cloud solutions that can consolidate monitoring and governance to avoid these issues. But, as per the Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report, only 29 percent of surveyed organizations had adopted solutions like a unified cloud management control plane.

Our partners at Cisco offer targeted solutions that help organizations improve cloud environments’ visibility, control and security to bridge hybrid cloud gaps.

Hybrid cloud environments often result in visibility gaps, as IT teams lose insight into performance across third-party networks, SaaS platforms and cloud providers. It usually takes more work to consolidate the metrics from disparate cloud services and on-premises systems in order to gain complete visibility.

ThousandEyes solves this issue by deploying a network of agents to monitor and test connectivity across the entire infrastructure. With a broad lateral integration, ThousandEyes can easily pull visibility metrics from various cloud, on-premises and third-party providers.

This way, IT teams have a clearer view of their hybrid infrastructure, which helps them prevent operational issues from occurring while fixing ad hoc anomalies faster.

Key features of ThousandEyes:

• End-to-end monitoring: Provides visibility across the breadth of IT infrastructure and third-party environments.
• Baseline establishment: Defines normal performance levels to detect anomalies effectively.
• Synthetic testing: Allows for proactive performance checks without disrupting operations.

The modern hybrid cloud is increasingly microservices-driven and requires complex workload management to secure the east-west traffic (flow of data between microservices). The Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report found that 35 percent of organizations need help with consistent security, access control and compliance.

HyperShield addresses these risks with advanced microsegmentation and a dual data plane architecture. It allows IT teams to secure microservices at a granular level while carrying out security tests without the need for replication.

With HyperShield, the security policies for the entire hybrid cloud can be tested using a secondary data plane that saves replication costs and offers consistency. It also enhances agility with automated policy recommendations and updates.

Key features of HyperShield:

• Consistent policy enforcement: Maintains uniform security policies across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Real-time testing: Enables updates and testing in production environments without impacting performance.
• Dynamic microsegmentation: Provides granular control over workload communication.

The Canadian Hybrid Cloud Report found that 34 percent of organizations use multiple public clouds with little to no interoperability. This often creates security management as well as operational bottlenecks for organizations.

While organizations can reap the benefits of cloud-specific services such as AWS S3 for storage and Google Cloud SQL for databases simultaneously, they must secure each service separately. As services grow, it becomes daunting to define and operate security policies.

MultiCloud Defense provides a unified SaaS solution for handling security configurations across public clouds such as AWS or Azure and private cloud environments. It replaces multiple security consoles with one dashboard that reports on all deployments across the IT infrastructure.

This helps IT teams save time by reducing manual configuration efforts for each cloud, ensuring consistent security and enhancing protection with automated responses.  

Key features of MultiCloud Defense:

• Unified policy management: Simplifies the application of security rules across different cloud providers.
• Integrated firewall management: Combines virtual and physical firewalls into a single platform.
• Automated threat response: Detects and mitigates security threats quickly.

Reactive monitoring methods can prove insufficient in ensuring resiliency for hybrid cloud architectures, especially for heavily converged systems. Organizations risk extended downtime and subpar customer experience as issues are manually isolated and fixed.

Instead, a proactive approach is more suitable for helping IT teams predict issues before they take place. Splunk enables IT teams to achieve predictive performance by delivering actionable insights and automation.

This ultimately reduces resolution times, automates routine security tasks and makes hybrid infrastructures more observable.

Key features of Splunk:

• Real-time analytics: Provides immediate insights into system performance and security.
• Root cause analysis: Identifies the origins of issues to prevent recurring problems.
• Incident automation: Responds to alerts with automated remediation steps.

CDW and Cisco collaborate to help organizations build resilient hybrid cloud architectures with the help of innovative technology and solution expertise.

Leveraging a deep understanding of Cisco's offerings, CDW designs and deploys customized solutions that address specific challenges in hybrid cloud environments, enhancing operational efficiency and security.

CDW also provides end-to-end support, from assessing organizational needs to implementing tailored solutions, ensuring that the integration of Cisco's technologies aligns with business objectives.

Organizations can achieve the following results by integrating Cisco's robust security technologies with CDW's expertise in solution customization and support. Here’s how we can help you:

• Make hybrid cloud less risky: A unified approach to resiliency across all platforms within the hybrid cloud, mitigating risks and ensuring data integrity.
• Simplify how your team manages hybrid services: Streamlined processes and reduced complexity in managing hybrid cloud environments, leading to improved productivity.
• Integrate cost-effective solutions with confidence: Solutions that adapt to evolving business needs, allowing for seamless expansion and integration of new technologies.

The Cisco and CDW partnership empowers organizations to build and maintain resilient hybrid cloud architectures that support growth and innovation while safeguarding critical assets.