Over the past several years, enterprises and government entities of all sizes have been enthusiastically supplanting their on-premise servers with information processing resources provided by major cloud computing vendors. There are numerous justifications for these wholesale migrations, ranging from diminished capital outlays to the heightened scalability and agility that are the hallmarks of on-demand computing.

To their dismay, however, many organizations discover that their cloud computing initiatives don’t deliver the anticipated results; in some cases, the entire undertaking stalls. There’s rarely a single culprit for such undesirable outcomes. Instead, these failures usually stem from a combination of factors such as unaddressed security exposures, performance shortfalls, neglected regulatory compliance, or user resistance. Even successful cloud computing projects are routinely plagued by the challenges of untangling complex, intertwined applications and an overall lack of visibility into their original computing environment.

To gain visibility throughout your environment, there are helpful strategies and tools at your disposal to analyze the mass amounts of data being generated. This is particularly true for those enterprises with the foresight to establish a baseline prior to the initiative and then compare it with the same metrics captured after the transition: essentially, these efforts act as an “insurance policy” to help mitigate risk.