Gigamon held its fifth annual Visualyze Bootcamp virtual event over a three-day period in early September. Since its founding 20 years ago, the company has matured its capabilities to offer a deep observability pipeline, leveraging network-derived intelligence and insights to detect threats often missed by traditional security tools. The Bootcamp is an opportunity for Gigamon to harness its industry knowledge and technical knowledge on behalf of customers (and a few others—like me).

It’s no secret that most organizations using cloud services employ a multi-cloud model to take advantage of both pricing leverage and access to best-of-breed service offerings tailored to discrete applications and workloads. There is also a growing trend to leverage containerization and virtualization to drive both operational and cost efficiencies across IT infrastructure. The value is undeniable, but at the same time, hybrid cloud deployments can introduce complexity and prescriptive management that is pinned to individual cloud service providers.

I found that Gigamon Visualyze Bootcamp went far to address many of these challenges; a handful of sessions related to compliance, Kubernetes management, and a customer panel were particularly insightful. Let’s dive into each and I will provide my perspective on what I found noteworthy.

Safeguarding Hybrid Cloud Networks

President and CEO Shane Buckley and chief product officer Michael Dickman kicked off the virtual event by sharing a number of business and technology updates in a fun, comedic talk-show format. Looking back at 2023 from a business perspective, Gigamon experienced 100% growth in its cloud business, and it’s no surprise that this led to a significant financial investment from private equity firm Siris earlier this year. From my perspective, this is a testament to the company’s continued success, punctuated by its Precryption technology announcement last year.

The company has added to this with the “Power of 3” cloud integration initiative that it announced with Dynatrace and Trace3 in June. Through this offering, Gigamon aims to provide customers with better visibility, management, and security for hybrid cloud infrastructures. It includes Gigamon network-derived intelligence, bringing network telemetry into the Dynatrace platform as well as leveraging Trace3’s IT channel design, implementation, and services capabilities. The result is a single, unified observability and security solution complemented by professional services that has the potential to improve application performance and user experience while enhancing developer productivity.

From a technology perspective, Buckley and Dickman anchored their discussion to the results of the Gigamon 2024 Hybrid Cloud Security Survey. A handful of key findings from the survey stand out. First and foremost, most organizations report critical visibility gaps, with 80% stating that achieving unified visibility into hybrid infrastructure is paramount for preventing cyberattacks. I couldn’t agree more. Hybrid cloud deployments introduce a range of challenges, including disaggregated applications and services, encrypted threat activity that can often evade detection, and incomplete and potentially compromised log files that can’t serve as a single source of truth. Another finding revealed that a staggering three-quarters of respondents believe that encrypted traffic is secure. That is simply not the case, given the ever-increasing sophistication of bad actors.

I’ll come back to some additional survey findings below, but suffice it to say that the evolution of the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline has tracked the ever-evolving threat landscape. It’s been remarkable to see how Gigamon has kept up with this landscape, from the company’s early days of tapping and aggregating network traffic, to architecting a network visibility fabric that tracks flow and metadata, to providing application context visibility, and culminating in today’s deep observability framework.

Compliance Considerations

Quite apart from security issues, hybrid cloud infrastructure can present organizations with a host of challenges from a compliance perspective. Consequently, I found this session at Visualyze Bootcamp very informative. Highly regulated industries including financial services and healthcare have high bars with respect to compliance mandates such as PCI and HIPAA. Both data at rest and data in motion must be compliant, and it’s the latter that becomes problematic in public cloud environments. One method to protect data in motion is leveraging network metadata, specifically through Gigamon Application Metadata Intelligence. 

Gigamon is using this capability to help organizations not only meet but also maintain regulatory compliance; doing so across multiple domains that include cloud, IoT operational environments, and traditional IT environments is especially compelling. Furthermore, Gigamon deep packet inspection capabilities supercharge its ability to deliver a single source of truth and consistent view across a wide network expanse that enables faster compliance execution and auditing.

Kubernetes Management Considerations

Managing Kubernetes clusters—and containerization more broadly—is a challenging endeavor. The inherent nature of containers, from the vast number of instances to lifecycles that can span minutes, hours, or days, makes them high-potential targets for security breaches. This Gigamon Visualyze session went far to address many of these challenges, as well as present a solution.

Not surprisingly, lack of visibility into lateral traffic flows is a problem within containers. A multi-layered architecture complicates matters, as do third party libraries that are often not scanned for vulnerabilities, leading to invisible container sprawl, configuration drift, and other problems. Gigamon has effectively addressed these issues with its GigaVUE Cloud Suite for Kubernetes. The solution provides deep observability into containerized applications as well as critical network intelligence that, in tandem, effectively track suspect lateral movement in any cluster size. I believe it’s a game-changer, one that can arm network developers and security operations professionals with the necessary resources to manage and secure Kubernetes environments at scale.

Gigamon Customer Insights

I always appreciate insights from customers when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of network and security infrastructure and tools, so I was eager to attend this virtual session at Visualyze Bootcamp. The session was hosted by Gigamon chief security officer Chaim Mazal; the discussion included three Gigamon customers and focused on the challenges and opportunities in eliminating the security gaps created by hybrid cloud infrastructure. Mazal used some additional findings from the company’s annual security survey I mentioned earlier to set valuable context for the discussion. Two of these were especially eye-opening. First, despite the very best efforts by organizations, only a third of breaches are detected with current monitoring tools; second, and even worse, the root cause of 25% of those breaches could not be determined within the first 30 days.

During the discussion, Gigamon customers tended to align on some central themes, including the need for a “single pane of glass” for enterprise-wide visibility, as well the establishment of a shared-responsibility model between public cloud providers and the organizations that use public cloud services. Not surprisingly, tool sprawl, IoT risk in expanding attack surfaces, and recent cybersecurity governmental mandates are combining to place new pressure on enterprise IT and OT teams. What I like about the Gigamon Deep Observability Pipeline is that it addresses many of these challenges today, and the company’s continual focus on building strategic alliances should only strengthen its offerings going forward.

You Can’t Secure What You Can’t See

During many of the Gigamon Visualyze Bootcamp sessions, I heard a repeated mantra: “You can’t secure what you can’t see.” I couldn’t agree more, and it will be interesting to follow the company’s continued journey in iterating its deep observability pipeline to adapt to the present and future challenges of securing and managing hybrid cloud infrastructure.