The move to the cloud has transformed enterprise IT, but it’s also created a significant challenge for network security and operations. While your on-premise network might be well-monitored, what about the data and applications running in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP)? This is the dilemma of modern hybrid and multi-cloud environments—a security and visibility gap that traditional tools struggle to bridge.
Traditional monitoring solutions were built for a static, on-premise world. They can effectively watch north-south traffic at your network perimeter but often have limited to no insight into what’s happening within the cloud or how traffic moves between your data center and a cloud service. This leaves security teams flying blind, making it difficult to detect threats, ensure compliance, and troubleshoot performance issues that span across these diverse environments.
The Problem of Siloed Visibility
In the cloud, the equivalent of on-premise NetFlow is known as Cloud Flow logs. These are available from all major cloud providers, including AWS (VPC Flow Logs), Azure (NSG and VNet Flow Logs), and Google Cloud (VPC Flow Logs). While a fantastic source of data, the tools used to collect and analyze these flow logs are typically cloud-specific. They run in their corresponding cloud environments and lack access to the NetFlow data collected on your physical network. This creates a fragmented, siloed approach to network visibility:
- On-Premise: You have NetFlow data detailing all your internal and internet-bound traffic.
- Cloud: You have Cloud Flow logs providing visibility within a single cloud provider’s environment.
- Hybrid: You have no single, unified view of the traffic flow between these two worlds, leaving a critical blind spot.
This visibility gap makes it nearly impossible to trace a security incident that begins on-premise and moves to the cloud, or to get a holistic view of your entire network’s performance.
The NetFlow Optimizer Angle: Your Single Source of Truth
The key to solving this problem is a solution that can ingest, normalize, and enrich data from both on-premise NetFlow and all major cloud providers’ Cloud Flow logs. Our NetFlow Optimizer solution is designed to do exactly this.
NetFlow Optimizer acts as a central hub, processing this disparate data and transforming it into a single, cohesive source of truth for your security and compliance teams. By providing a unified view, it enables you to:
- Track Data Flows Across Environments: See exactly how data is moving between your on-premise network and your cloud instances. You can track sensitive data, critical applications, and ensure security policies are being enforced correctly across both environments.
- Monitor User and Application Activity: The optimizer enriches raw flow data with crucial context, associating IP addresses with user identities, application names, and device details. This is vital for detecting unauthorized access, lateral movement, or policy violations whether they occur on-premise or in the cloud.
- Ensure Consistent Security Policies: With a unified view of all traffic, you can verify that your security policies are being applied consistently across all environments. This helps you spot misconfigurations or gaps that could be exploited by attackers, leading to improved compliance.
- Reduce Data Volume: Both NetFlow and Cloud Flow logs are incredibly voluminous. The NetFlow Optimizer intelligently reduces this sheer volume by aggregating redundant flows and removing meaningless data, making the remaining information manageable and useful for analysis.
The NetFlow Optimizer is not just about collecting data; it’s about making that data intelligent and actionable. By normalizing data from different sources and enriching it with context, it empowers your security and operations teams to gain a complete and consistent picture of your network. This eliminates the guesswork and allows for proactive management of risk and compliance in complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Stop letting the cloud fragment your security visibility. With optimized NetFlow and Cloud Flow logs, you can gain a complete and consistent picture of all your network traffic, allowing you to proactively manage risk and ensure compliance.
Contact us today to learn how NetFlow Optimizer can help you bridge the visibility gap and strengthen your cloud security posture. You can also schedule a demo here.