Public cloud environments provide too little information for IT security professionals.

New research shows that companies have little insight into their public cloud environments. The tools and data that cloud providers provide for this are insufficient. For this reason, security staff at companies fear that the lack of insight means that risks remain invisible.

That’s what a new investigation by Keysight Technologies shows. The company spoke for its State of Cloud Monitoring survey with 388 employees who are active in information technology. Together with Dimensional Research and Ixia, Keysight asked them about the security and monitoring challenges faced by IT staff in public and private cloud environments.

Lack of visibility

As many as 87 percent of respondents said they feared that a lack of visibility of cloud environments prevents them from properly identifying security threats to their organizations. The lack of visibility can cause a number of problems, according to a spokesman for Keysight Technologies.

For example, it is not possible to identify and track application performance problems. Also, IT staff are unable to monitor and deliver service-level agreements, and there is a delay when it comes to detecting and resolving threats and exploits.

Worse performance

Nearly 95 percent of respondents said that visibility problems cause their applications or networks to experience performance problems. 70 percent say that public cloud monitoring is more difficult than monitoring data centers and private clouds. Less than 20 percent said they have the data they need to keep a close eye on public cloud environments.

The combination of these factors makes it clear that there is still a lot of work to be done by providers of public cloud services. Too often, IT staff do not have sufficient resources to be able to properly identify what is going on with their cloud. Given the growing importance of cloud services, it is essential to respond to this.