Gigamon: A Bigger Picture Approach to Hybrid Cloud Security and Observability

Most organisations today have adopted a hybrid cloud architecture. While there are significant benefits to cloud computing, such as reduced cost of ownership, on-demand scaling, and simplified management, hybrid cloud environments also present significant challenges to Security, CloudOps, and Infrastructure teams:

1. Fragmented Security and Compliance

Most (90%+) customers operate in multi-cloud environments, leading to inevitable blind spots caused by complex interactions between on-premises, cloud, and containerised workloads, as well as encrypted traffic. The rise of hybrid cloud has expanded the attack surface, while attackers have become increasingly sophisticated, well-resourced, and patient. This has intensified the demand for a unified security posture across on-premises and cloud workloads. However, central IT and security operations teams are often perceived as obstacles to business agility by line-of-business units, developers, and cloud operations teams.

2. Inefficient Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Each platform within a hybrid infrastructure typically has its own set of tools, making it challenging to achieve east-west visibility across the entire environment. Cloud-native monitoring and observability tools, while valuable, often operate in silos and lack the complete network packet-level visibility required for comprehensive security and performance analysis.

3. Spiralling Cloud Costs and Complexity

Cloud environments have proven to be more complex and costly than many organisations initially anticipated. With 80% of IT leaders facing pressure to reduce or contain cloud costs, even as business users demand increased agility, organisations are seeking ways to optimise their cloud investments. Moving data across zones or out of the cloud can often be cost-prohibitive. Additionally, the need to monitor and secure hybrid environments requires a multitude of tools, further increasing complexity and management overhead.

Making Matters Worse: Data & Tool Inefficiencies

Added to these challenges, data traffic continues to grow exponentially, security threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated and difficult to identify, and network quality is critical for user experience. As a result, organisations are adopting a growing number of security and observability tools, often selected by different teams and frequently overlapping in functionality.

The real challenge arises when combining increased blind spots, data volumes, distribution of workloads and tool proliferation. Given the sheer volume of network traffic today, sending all traffic to all tools not only requires high-performance hardware for each tool, driving up costs, but also dilutes the quality of the data analysed, and reduces tool efficiency. This can lead to missed threats and performance issues, reducing the overall effectiveness of these tools.

Gigamon: A Bigger Picture Solution

To address the complexities of hybrid cloud environments, bigger picture thinking is needed.

Gigamon plays a pivotal role in delivering critical network intelligence and metadata to an organisation’s hybrid cloud, security, and observability tools, across the full stack. By efficiently capturing, filtering and directing all hybrid cloud network traffic to the most relevant tools, Gigamon’s Deep Observability Pipeline empowers Security, CloudOps, and Infrastructure teams to eliminate blind spots and reduce tool costs. This optimised approach also accelerates problem identification and resolution.

Gigamon Benefits

The Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline provides visibility into all data-in-motion from any workload to any tool across any platform. Some of the key security features and benefits Gigamon delivers are:

1. Eliminates Blind Spots:
   • Detects vulnerabilities in all N-S, E-W, virtualised, containerised, and encrypted traffic
   • Simplifies monitoring, security, and compliance with simplified access to traffic across all hybrid-cloud platforms
2. Enhances Tools:
   • Delivers high-fidelity traffic and metadata to enhance security, performance and observability tool effectiveness
   • Accelerates cloud migration and re-platforming projects through a common tools stack – by bringing the network to the tools and enabling network telemetry to move ‘with the workload’ should an organisation wish to re-locate any workloads into or out of cloud environments.
3. Contains Hybrid Cloud Costs and Complexity:
   • Eliminates irrelevant traffic to tools and saves on tool, bandwidth, and data movement costs by ~50%
   • Offers the ability to reuse existing tools for cloud workloads, extending the life of these tools and leveraging expertise

Gigamon customers typically see 50% average traffic reduction, millions of dollars in savings and rapid ROI within 4-6 months.

Your Opportunity

Gigamon supports more than 200 industry-leading tools, including Vectra, Forescout, Nozomi, Tenable, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, SentinelOne, Proofpoint, Imperva, F5, Exabeam, and Nutanix. For partners, many of these tools sit within your existing portfolios, making it simpler to have a bigger picture conversation with customers about proven integrations, and easier to develop a more margin-rich, solution-oriented sale.

Exclusive Networks’ partnership with Gigamon goes back over 10 years, and we’re ready to help you deliver the bigger picture to your customers. You have a powerful role to play in helping them architect their tool stacks more efficiently across their hybrid cloud environments. That bigger picture thinking starts today with you.

Get in touch with your local Exclusive Networks team to discuss a Gigamon partnership.