As companies continue to accelerate their digital transformation, their cloud environments are evolving to keep up with increased data usage and storage.
However, some claim that this also raises security risks, much too large to monitor without automation and insights.
According to observability platform, Dynatrace, 86% of technology leaders say cloud-native technology stacks produce an explosion of data that is beyond humans’ ability to manage.
Additionally, 88% of technology leader respondents added that the complexity of their tech stack has increased in the past year, and over half (51%) say it will continue to increase.
Avoiding tech stack bloat means increased reliance on the cloud, and the use of multicloud services. However, most technology leaders (84%) say that multicloud complexity makes it even more difficult to protect applications from security vulnerabilities and attacks.
This, in turn, is where observability makes its case as a vital component in enterprise tech security.
Offering a single pane of glass view, hybrid observability goes into your tech stack, collects data – including the cloud, and any on-premises storage – and uses technologies such as AI that can identify any anomalies, suggesting a security vulnerability, and flag for better efficiencies.
“It’s really important to observe what’s going on,” says Matt Tuson, general manager EMEA at monitoring firm LogicMonitor.
LogicMonitor utilises AI to catch any problems within the cloud and raises them to “significantly speed up the troubleshooting process.”
“What does that mean to the business? We’re more efficient, I have fewer people, better time to resolution, and my mission-critical services are up all the time when our customers need,” Tuson says.
Soldo is an enterprise spending management platform used to track employee expenses.
With a goal to help companies organise and view their spending; while making expense processes more efficient, the protection of customer data is vital.
The London-based fintech began in 2015 as a cloud-native firm, working directly with AWS’s public cloud. Although, Luca Domenella, head of cloud operations and DevOps at Soldo, expresses that this was a learning curve for the founding team.
“The technical and management teams who started Soldo had a lot of experience managing on-premises data centres,” Domenella explains. “But we decided to go on the cloud because of the facility to manage initial costs and have a better ability to scale up infrastructure.”
“We had to manage new challenges because we knew perfectly how to manage on-premises security, but there are different behaviours to security on the cloud.”
Initially, AWS helped Soldo provide perimetral security in its design and provided tools to increase visibility, but Domenella insisted it needed deeper monitoring.
“Because Soldo develops our own applications, the most important thing is to create security layers and have all customer data secure,” he says.
“Since we manage payments and financial transactions, we also need to comply with many security certifications.”
Domenella adds that, as the company grew, it needed to move faster in determining the root cause of problems, whether it be vulnerability or security issues.
After spending several weeks testing other products in the market, Soldo landed on Dynatrace’s observability tool.
“After the first year, it became the best brick of our infrastructure,” he says. “It was something I was proud of because I wanted to have more visibility inside the applications.”
Observability has since relieved Soldo when risk has appeared. For example, during the Log4j vulnerability which exposed millions of computers which use the logging tool worldwide to potential attack, Dynatrace immediately alerted Soldo of the weakness in its infrastructure.
“It’s vital simply because we need to understand what’s going on in our infrastructure to protect ourselves and our customers’ data,” he says. “There’s a lot of personal information, names, emails, phone numbers, and our personal information as well.”
“Our customers need to be aware that their data is safe. This is why security is so important to us.”
Stuck between an older generation with preferences for in-person banking and a digitally native younger generation, many financial institutions are forced into hybrid cloud models that can cater to each end of the spectrum.
These hybrid models make environments complex, and more than half (54%) of financial services businesses expect it to grow over the next year, according to Dynatrace.
Observability, therefore, provides an overall view, even when it’s a mix of on-premises and off, or multicloud solutions.
“We used to think that all companies would go 100% on the cloud, but that’s definitely not been the case,” says Tuson. “We’ve been seeing even some reverse and coming back to being on-prem.”
This may be because customers feel data on-prem is more secure, for cost reasons, or a lack of optimisation on their end of the cloud.
What observability can also help is tracking how much spending is going into the cloud through monitoring.
“We can look at the cloud and see if a firm is spending too much in this area with regards to cost optimisation,” explains Tuson.
“Because we’re collecting the information, we can see which ones are being utilised and which are not, and make suggestions to banks, insurance companies, fintech firms, to ensure that they’re utilising them efficiently.”
Not only does this eliminate any overspending, but also helps institutions cut back on power usage. “We can ensure your network, infrastructure and applications are running to the highest degree of effectiveness, with the least amount of energy,” Tuson claims.
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