For many enterprises, the “Cloud Migration” journey has reached a complex middle ground: the Hybrid Reality. You have critical workloads in AWS or Azure, yet your core “crown jewels” remain in on-premises data centers.
To secure this environment, many teams rely on cloud-native tools like VPC Flow Logs or NSG Flow Logs. But as hybrid architectures scale, security teams are discovering a dangerous truth: Cloud-native logging alone leaves you blind to the journey between the edge and the core.
To achieve true hybrid security, you need a unified stream of telemetry that treats your data center and your cloud as a single, cohesive entity. Here is why NetFlow Optimizer (NFO) is the missing link in your hybrid strategy.
The “Visibility Gap” in Cloud-Native Logs
Cloud providers offer excellent tools for what happens inside their own walls. However, when it comes to hybrid security, cloud-native logs present three major architectural challenges:
- The Correlation Lag: While cloud logs are produced in intervals, the real delay often happens afterward—waiting for those logs to be ingested, parsed, and correlated with your on-premises data. By the time a security analyst manually connects a cloud event to a local server spike in traffic or CPU/Memory usage, the window for containment has often closed.
- Missing On-Premises Context: Cloud logs are “platform-aware” but not “infrastructure-aware.” They don’t know what’s happening on your on-prem Cisco switches or your physical firewalls. When a threat moves laterally from a cloud instance to an on-prem database, the trail often goes cold at the hybrid gateway.
- Fragmented Telemetry: Security analysts are forced to jump between tabs—checking Azure Monitor for cloud traffic and a different tool for the data center. This “swivel-chair” analysis increases MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) and allows sophisticated threats to hide in the seams between environments.
The Solution: NFO’s Unified Hybrid Stream
NetFlow Optimizer (NFO) eliminates the “border” between your environments by unifying hybrid telemetry into a single, high-fidelity stream for your SIEM (like Splunk or Microsoft Sentinel).
1. Accelerated Processing & Immediate Export
NFO is designed for speed. Once cloud flow logs are produced, NFO ingests, enriches, and exports them to your analytics platform immediately. By automating the transformation of raw cloud logs into actionable security events, NFO ensures your SIEM is alerted the moment the data is available, without the overhead of secondary batch processing.
2. The “Single Pane of Glass” for East-West Traffic
NFO normalizes data from disparate sources—VPC logs, IPFIX, and NetFlow—into a consistent format. This provides a true “single pane of glass” view. You can track a user’s journey as they authenticate in the cloud and access a legacy application in your data center, all within a single dashboard.
3. Identity-Enriched Security
By correlating cloud flow data with your identity providers (like Entra ID or Active Directory), NFO adds the “Who” to the “What.” You don’t just see an IP address moving data; you see a specific user account performing a cross-environment transfer, allowing for instant policy validation.
Why Hybrid Teams Need NFO
- Reduced SIEM Costs: Cloud-native logs can be massive and expensive to store. NFO filters and optimizes the data at the source, sending only high-value security events to your SIEM, which significantly reduces ingestion and licensing costs.
- Simplified Compliance: Auditors require a consistent security posture across your entire estate. NFO provides a unified audit trail for hybrid traffic, making it easy to prove that policies are being enforced everywhere.
- Enhanced Threat Hunting: Detect lateral movement that jumps the gap between cloud and physical infrastructure—a favorite tactic of modern ransomware actors.
Conclusion: Security Without Borders
Your business doesn’t stop at the edge of the cloud, and your security visibility shouldn’t either. To protect a hybrid environment, you must stop treating “Cloud” and “On-Prem” as separate silos.
NetFlow Optimizer provides the high-fidelity, identity-enriched telemetry required to see across the entire landscape. It’s time to move beyond the edge and gain total control over your hybrid security.
Are you struggling with fragmented visibility in your hybrid cloud?
Contact us today to learn how NFO unifies your telemetry stream, or Schedule a Demo to see our Microsoft Sentinel and Splunk integrations in action.