We open on an all-too-familiar scene: a business-critical application is down, and multiple teams are working in tandem to troubleshoot the issue. Cloud engineers aren’t seeing any problems with their security groups. Network engineers aren’t finding any ACL rules that are blocking traffic. And yet, the application team is still reporting timeouts.

Each of these teams has a different view of their shared infrastructure, spread across different tools. And each of these tools show only a fragment of the application’s path across their hybrid multi-cloud environment. For example:

• CMDBs are often incomplete and inaccurate, missing as much as 40% of the network.
• Observability tools can’t give you the depth of insights you need to understand cloud and network behavior.
• Application performance monitoring tools can tell you that an application has degraded, but can only pinpoint the problem if it’s within the application itself.
• Service mapping tools rely on inferred or logical relationships, rather than actual cloud and network behavior.

As a result, no one team has unified visibility into how cloud and network controls affect application performance and reachability.

Read on to learn more about the impact of this visibility gap—and how IP Fabric and Illumio are embarking on an industry-first partnership to fix it.

What Could Fragmented Visibility Be Costing You?

Imagine that you’re tweaking a firewall rule or adjusting a segmentation policy, but as soon as your changes hit production, you see a spike in connection resets. As with any incident, you need to ask yourself:

• What infrastructure does this app depend on?
• Which applications and services are affected?
• Is this application properly segmented and compliant with security / regulatory standards?

In an ideal world, you’d have known the answers to these questions before pushing the change in the first place. But if you don’t have a quick and easy way to correlate cloud, network, and application data, then you’re probably paying for it in the form of risky changes, lengthy troubleshooting, failed security audits, and unreliable automation.

Risky Change Management

Every change carries risk. The only way to minimize that risk is by anticipating the blast radius of a change ahead of time. And to do that, organizations need a view of their environment that spans from critical applications to on-prem and cloud environments.

Needless to say, traditional Visio diagrams and cloud documentation don’t cover this scope, so engineers usually fill in the blanks using their own knowledge of cloud and network behavior. But this approach has a few limitations, namely that it:

• Only covers known devices.
• Isn’t vendor neutral.
• Doesn’t update automatically.
• Can’t be easily be used by other teams, tools, or AI/automation workflows.

Given these visibility gaps, it’s difficult to determine the impact of a change on any part of the environment. Unfortunately this means that organizations usually don’t find out what context they were missing until something breaks.

Lengthy Troubleshooting

When an application goes down, the only reliable way to find the root cause is by correlating cloud, network, and application data. If organizations do this correlation manually, it not only lengthens MTTR unnecessarily, but also obscures any issues that occur at the workload level.

Think back to the example at the beginning of this blog post; while it may have seemed like the cloud an network were behaving as usual, the fault could have been a workload-level policy that no siloed team or tool could see.

Security Exposure & Failed Audits

Host-based enforcement is now a core requirement for any Zero Trust architecture. However, if you can’t see how your applications interact with underlying infrastructure, it impacts your organization in two key ways. Firstly, you won’t be able to prove that your segmentation policies and other security controls are behaving as you intended, which means you don’t have compelling evidence for security audits. And secondly, you’ll slow incident resolution, leaving security teams to manually pull logs, dependencies, and segmentation data from disparate sources.

Untrustworthy AI & Automation

As organizations deploy AI across change management, troubleshooting, and audit workflows, they’re discovering that AI agents are just as likely to make mistakes as human teams if their decisions are based off of fragmented data. AI can make those decisions faster than humans can, propagating errors at machine pace. Over time, this can degrade an organization’s trust in AI and slow progress towards digital transformation initiatives.

How Do We Close These Visibility Gaps?

Each of these costs is firmly rooted in the visibility gaps between cloud, network, and application tooling. In order to close these gaps, you need to find a way to:

1. Discover your actual cloud and network behavior.
2. Understand which network, cloud, and workload-level controls impact performance and reachabilty.
3. Correlate cloud, network, and application layers into a unified view.

And IP Fabric is collaborating with Illumio to help joint customers do just that.

Why Is IP Fabric Partnering With Illumio?

If you could add Illumio’s application context to IP Fabric’s model of cloud and network behavior, you’d get a unified view of how applications connect to cloud and network environments. Looking forward, you’ll be able to use that app-aware model to:

• Determine the blast radius of a change or incident by understanding how devices, paths, and policies impact applications.
• Accelerate troubleshooting by identifying whether an issue is caused by network policies, cloud controls, or host-based enforcement.
• Instantly validate segmentation policies and security controls, and generate proof of continuous compliance.
• De-risk AI and automation initiatives by contextualizing every change and automated workflow with app-level data.

IP Fabric’s collaboration with Illumio is the first of its kind, going beyond the capabilities of any siloed tool so that when organizations are asked “Can you prove that you’re in control of your ‘crown jewel’ applications?” they can confidently say “yes.”

Stay tuned for more updates on IP Fabric’s collaboration with Illumio, or contact our team for more details.