Visibility-as-a-Service (VAAS)

What Is Visibility-As-A-Service (VaaS)?

Visibility-as-a-Service enables IT organizations to access network traffic across their entire infrastructure on demand, whether it resides in a public or private cloud, branch office, campus, or data center.

Network visibility is key to the performance and security of your network and the applications that run on it. However, access to the network to tap into data flows may not always be easy. When workloads transit the public cloud, visibility can be lost. To address this, VaaS is emerging to enable access across any deployment and in particular the public cloud.

Public Cloud Visibility Challenges

Visibility is the foundation for providing application and network performance monitoring as well as security and trouble shooting. Within a traditional data center, IT uses taps and bypass switches (Ethernet/optical), to get packet visibility. In addition packet brokers can be used for advanced packet analysis.

Enterprise applications are currently making a dramatic shift from traditional data centers to the public cloud. Proving visibility and in turn security in such diverse environments has become a huge challenge. The average company uses between 10 and 16 cloud applications according to one business survey. With more and more cloud-based apps, more data is moving outside the traditional data center.

IT needs to focus on security and compliance for their instances and usage, which can best be addressed with a cloud visibility solution. VaaS enables organizations to view their public cloud network traffic in an elastic and scalable manner.

IaaS Or SaaS For Your VaaS?

When choosing a VaaS solution, the implementation architecture has implications on the effort and resources needed by the IT organization. Some VaaS solutions are implemented as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). IT needs to install, configure, and ensure uptime of the visibility solution in the cloud within a virtual machine (VM). Cloud traffic requiring monitoring is transported to the VM. This can quickly drive up the bandwidth used and costs that IT pays to the cloud service provider.

A more elegant architectural approach is to use a SaaS model that requires minimal IT installation, maintenance, and uptime assurance. Choosing a VaaS implementation that is SaaS-based provides a platform agnostic, scalable and independently accessible anywhere deployment. Whether you are using Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, your experience is the same. Lastly, architectures that filter the data in the source instance and only send the needed packets or metadata to the security, performance, or analytics tools, consume much less cloud bandwidth saving IT money.