Embrace the Chaos 

As the CEO of Aviatrix for the past 9 months, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing the key elements for success in action – robust technology, a highly skilled workforce, a top-tier enterprise customer base, and a rapidly expanding market. My confidence in these elements has only grown stronger after engaging with over 100 customers. During these interactions, I discovered a common challenge faced by enterprise CISOs, CIOs, and their cloud networking and security teams-the need to embrace and promote cloud chaos. 

What does it mean to “embrace and promote chaos”? There’s bad chaos, and there’s good chaos. In the early years of the cloud, enterprise application developers quietly revolted by bypassing traditional IT organizations, who they saw as slowing them down. This resulted in the first stages of chaos. Some viewed this as bad chaos and tried to control it, enforcing draconian measures for compliance. Others embraced the benefits of speed and agility that developers value by embracing the chaos. 

This first wave of positive chaos has been followed by a growing tsunami of diversity and heterogeneity as additional clouds and SaaS applications have been rapidly added to the organizational landscape. The typical organization has now found that in addition to their private data centers (that most are not eager to get rid of anytime soon, and many are thoughtfully repatriating appropriate workloads to), they are dealing with a multitude of workloads spread across a multitude of clouds.  With the coming onslaught of industry verticalized and functionally tuned GenAI-driven solutions, teams are bracing for additional waves of chaos and diversity. 

While attempting to prevent this diversity is a potential solution, it comes at a high cost. It can slow down crucial experimentation and innovation, and even turn departments and employees into adversaries-a counterproductive tactic for a critical enablement function.  Enlightened CISOs and CIOs have chosen a different path. They’ve planned and architected their IT systems to embrace the forthcoming wave of positive cloud chaos, rather than fighting it. Their challenge lies in meeting the requirements for applications to operate in multiple clouds for multiple reasons, all while mitigating business risk, maintaining compliance, and keeping up with the speed of the cloud. 

What I learned from our customers is that visibility, transparency, insight and “hidden controls” are the secrets to embracing chaos. The ability to operate a consistent infrastructure to, within, and between all public clouds—consistent networking, network security, operational visibility, and infrastructure as code automation—allows cloud network, security, and operations teams to embrace the positive chaos of applications operating in any cloud across any region in addition to simultaneously managing private data centers, manufacturing sites, branch offices and IoT landscapes (the enterprise edge). On their cloud journeys, enterprises have painfully discovered that cloud service providers do not offer this capability. The CSP delivered networking services logically only work in their own clouds and limit the level of detailed insight and control delivered.  In a world of many clouds and increasingly distributed workloads across specialty providers, this creates negative chaos, a landscape that can’t be effectively viewed and consistently managed. 

Another key lesson has been the importance of architecture since “lift-and-shift” doesn’t deliver. Enterprises I spoke with learned this painful lesson early in their cloud journey. It’s expensive and challenging to manage lift-and-shift applications, which can’t take advantage of the changes delivered through the cloud architected data centers. The criticality of this “no lift and shift” approach applies with even greater importance for cloud networking and security. Customers tried lifting-and-shifting traditional data center networking firewalls and the last generation data center era architecture into the cloud because they thought it was the only option.  

Today, there’s a better choice, which converges networking and network security into a distributed system designed to consistently support the distributed nature of cloud within and across all clouds. 

Aviatrix will be at the RSA Conference on May 6 – 9. If you’re attending, join us at booth #6582 and discover how our solution can save your enterprise significant costs, while enhancing the depth and effectiveness of your networking and security needs. Let’s discuss your perspective on embracing the wave of positive chaos that may already be impacting your organization.  

P.S. Join me for a LIVE streamed Fireside chat on May 8 at 9:30am PT with Enterprise Strategy Group’s John Grady, Principal Analyst, Network Security & Web Application Security as we discuss cloud security and network convergence strengthens attack response. Register here.