What IT pros need to know about having visibility into a hybridized system

What you don’t know could hurt you. That’s why IT pros need dashboards and other monitoring tools that provide maximum insight into their increasingly hybridized IT infrastructure—but what if they’re not getting what they need?

AI could help ensure IT teams have full visibility into on-premises and cloud systems. Kevin Sheu, VP of product and solutions at Versa Network, which provides security, networking, cloud, and analytics, told IT Brew that AI products can help fuse systems together for boosted visibility, especially when combined with Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source framework that standardizes how AI platforms integrate and share data with other tools.

Hybridized environments are the norm for most organizations today, but they can lead to disparities in the ability to monitor cloud services versus on-premises capabilities, Raghu Nandakumara, Illumio’s VP of industry strategy, told IT Brew. Those disparities, in turn, can lead to cybersecurity issues.

“It’s in those gaps in consistency…that attackers exploit, those gaps in observability particularly as you cross between two environments,” Nandakumara said. “That’s why having consistent visibility observability as you transition into a hybrid-type environment is so important because…You want to have that consistent view so that you can then understand your risks in a consistent manner and address them.”

Suddenly, I see. Most companies may acknowledge they don’t have 100% visibility into their systems, especially when it comes to third-party AI services designed and run by others.

Sheu said that while MCP can expedite agentic integrations and innovation across an organization, it can also serve as a glue when integrating environments.

“AIOps plays a role in serving as a glue between on-prem, cloud, and all points in between,” Sheu said. “MCP then becomes a mechanism for that AIOps to occur but it also allows different agents that might be in the cloud, different agents that might be on prem and hybrid environments. Now, suddenly, the agents that are powering all these different environments, they can all then interact with your overall AIOps program.”

What to do about it. Because observability can lead to a plethora of different insights, including better context into which tools are performing at a key level, Nandakumara said that professionals have to determine how to monitor systems in a “consistent and effective manner.”

“There has to be a very clear need you’re trying to address,” Nandakumara said. “What we need is a consistent view of network telemetry…across the entire hybrid environment.”

Scott Manchester, Nerdio’s chief product and technology officer, agreed with Nandakumara that organizations shouldn’t be “measuring something for the sake of measuring it” and should find a partner to provide visibility services so that organizations can not only see everything going on, but take meaningful action when something needs to be changed.

“I’m hearing from the user that they say, ‘Performance is bad,’ but without some way to actually correct that, then those [observability] dashboards aren’t really that useful to an organization,” Manchester said.