Why Are Your Cloud Costs Rising Despite ‘Good’ Monitoring?

If your enterprise has moved workloads to the public cloud, you understand that visibility is absolutely essential. However, even with extensive monitoring tools in place, many organizations still face a significant issue: a hidden blind spot that quietly hampers performance, heavily impacts budgets, and, most importantly, worsens the end-user experience.

Standard cloud-native environments offer fundamental tools such as logs, traces, and metrics. These tools provide a robust foundation for observability and a crystal-clear view of the cloud hardware resources an enterprise has purchased. They are excellent for monitoring hardware health and machine performance.

The Hidden Risks: Why Infrastructure Monitoring Alone Is Not Enough?

The challenge arises as soon as an organization looks beyond the basic components of the infrastructure. The standard tools may not be sufficient for enterprises to ensure that their business goals are aligned with their cloud network and application usage. These limitations create serious hidden risks, extending beyond basic performance issues into governance, security, and finance.

For enterprises, these key blind spots translate directly into discernable concerns:

1. Application Performance and QoE: Are the applications running optimally, hitting their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? More critically, what is the actual Quality of Experience (QoE) delivered to users: is the service fast and snappy, or slow and frustrating?
2. SLA Assurance: If the organization provides online services, can it absolutely guarantee that it is meeting its committed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) regarding up-time and performance?
3. Network Congestion: Standard cloud tools often fail to detect issues on corporate WAN links or internet connections to the cloud: lifelines that, if congested, cause performance to drop for everyone.
4. Hidden Costs and Bill Shock: Perhaps the scariest consequence of poor observability is the lack of control over consumption. Without application and user intelligence, enterprises cannot effectively reduce waste or set policies that optimize usage. This inability to control traffic directly results in unexpected, massive cloud expenditures, leading to the notorious problem of bill shock.

The Path to Repatriation: When Loss of Control Becomes Unbearable

When enterprises constantly struggle with poor QoE, failing SLAs, and the fear of a “hidden cost or performance nightmare lurking around the corner,” they lose the confidence required to scale their cloud operations. The combination of soaring, unoptimized cloud expenses and ongoing performance instability can force IT leaders to reconsider their fundamental cloud strategy, often leading to discussions of repatriation, or moving workloads back to private infrastructure, to regain budget and performance control. Achieving end-to-end observability and real traffic control is essential to prevent such drastic measures.

Reclaiming Control: Total Observability with ACTI

To successfully manage public cloud operations and gain the confidence to scale, enterprises need a complete toolkit that moves beyond simple infrastructure monitoring.

This is where Allot Cloud Traffic Intelligence (ACTI) comes into play. ACTI offers enterprise customers deep observability and comprehensive control over their public cloud environments. It is built to solve these exact problems, complementing existing foundational cloud tools by adding the missing layer of application and user intelligence.

Through ACTI, IT and security teams get a rich, intuitive platform allowing them to monitor traffic by office, application, and service, investigate anomalies, and ensure policy compliance across their entire public cloud footprint. By reducing cloud blind spots, ACTI helps enterprises enforce governance and mitigate security and financial risks.

ACTI delivers advanced control that translates directly into savings and performance gains. Customers can enforce smart policies through capabilities like bandwidth limitation, cloud traffic prioritization, and fairness/fair usage models. For example, users can assign different priorities per branch or application group or limit traffic flowing toward the cloud to ease bottlenecks when the Application Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is congested and QoE is affected. This focus on optimizing bandwidth and eliminating waste allows ACTI users to achieve optimal Quality of Experience (QoE) for cloud-based applications and services. By setting up these smart traffic policies, organizations can significantly impact their bottom line; market benchmarks show that using ACTI can lead to an average savings of 25% on annual cloud expenses.