Aviatrix Cloud Networking Heroes labor to keep networks secure, effective, and performant. We’re proud to highlight people who have taught themselves the necessary skills, designed and managed successful networks, and have the expertise to share. In this Cloud Networking Hero guest post, Akarsha Lavania, Cybersecurity Consultant/SOC Analyst, explains why visibility is the key to successful cloud network security.
Comprehensive visibility is the cloud network security superpower. While every organization should prioritize security-first cloud architectures and invest in the right security solutions, visibility is the essential, ongoing, consistent work needed to keep a network safe.
Pursuing network-wide visibility acknowledges the fact that cybersecurity is an ongoing process rather than a destination that can be reached.
In this blog, I’ll explore why visibility matters in cloud network security and how you can maximize it in your organization.
What You’ll Learn:
Why a lack of visibility is a network security risk
Best practices for achieving network visibility and observability
The role of visibility in a defense-in-depth strategy
Benefits and challenges of using AI tools in network visibility
Network Visibility as a Constant Safeguard
Multicloud and hybrid environments have raised security threats to such levels that companies require integrated proactive protection which can adapt to their needs.
One of the main security vulnerabilities that remains a top cause of breaches stems from misconfigured systems that result from inadequate visibility alongside human mistakes.
Major cloud providers are recognizing visibility as a critical aspect of network security. For example, Google’s planned acquisition of Wiz demonstrates how highly this hyperscale values total visibility. Wiz’s agentless scanning and updated methods for assessing risks and alter processes make it much more useful than just another view or extra data – they help security teams see “toxic combinations” of vulnerabilities for high-risk assets and prioritize possible threats.
The industry-wide issue of lack of visibility includes four main problems:
Lack of observability – For organizations that use multiple clouds, security teams’ inability to monitor entire data flows through multiple systems
Lack of telemetry – For multicloud or hybrid environments, decentralized logging and inconsistent metrics
Lack of troubleshooting – The ability to debug problems in short-lived computing environments that use containers or functions
Lack of oversight – The use of shadow IT together with unmanaged assets creates security gaps because employees establish non-governed platforms and tools outside standard policies.
While there are other factors that contribute to breaches, such as encryption processes that are incomplete when data travels across multiple platforms and API, a lack of visibility gives attackers freedom to work in the dark. It also robs organizations of the control they need to protect their environments.
To tackle these challenges in my own work, I leverage:
Observability tools that unite data – To avoid the overwhelm and fragmentation you get when working with different systems, I use tools like Datadog and AWS CloudWatch to get a comprehensive view I can work with. Datadog helps us correlate metrics, traces, and logs across multi-cloud environments, while CloudWatch gives deeper visibility into AWS-native workloads.
Example: A few months ago, we noticed a sudden spike in outbound traffic from a staging environment—nothing major on the surface, but Datadog flagged it because it broke our usual pattern. We dug in, and it turned out an internal tool was misconfigured and unintentionally exposing data externally. The alert let us fix it within minutes—before anything left the environment.
Without centralized observability, we would’ve caught it too late—if at all. That’s the kind of edge good visibility gives you: early signals that prevent real damage.
Standardized tagging systems and automated correlation between logs and metrics across platforms – I simplify and streamline management by using standard tags to group resources across clouds and systems.
Defense-in-Depth: The Visibility Layer
Recently, advanced persistent threat (APT) groups like Salt Typhoon have highlighted the importance of network visibility. These groups specialize in long-term planning, patience, and dedication. They infiltrate networks through weaknesses such as stolen credentials or social engineering, establish persistence by escalating privileges and moving laterally, and then attack by either stealing data or unleashing malware.
Visibility is a critical defense against these types of attacks because these threat actors can’t hide their every move – spikes in network traffic and traffic anomalies will give them away.
An organization needs multiple defense layers to counter APT threat groups:
Behavioral analytics – Organizations should invest in behavioral analytics units with threat intelligence integration and zero-trust network architecture implementation.
Security training – Security teams must conduct both threat hunting drills and perform red teaming assessments to reveal defensive weak points before attackers take advantage of them.
Rapid response – Modern security needs to cover more than just prevention; it also requires prompt detection followed by fast response capabilities. The response team’s experience along with established incident playbooks represents a critical requirement for organizations.
Layered monitoring – Layered monitoring means observing all layers—network, applications, identities, and endpoints—rather than relying on a single source of truth. It’s how you stop threats before they snowball.
To make it work:
Monitor traffic for weird patterns.
Use agents to track what apps are doing.
Keep an eye on who’s logging in, and from where.
Send all logs to a central place (like a SIEM).
Automate alerts so you don’t miss anything.
Threats don’t happen in isolation. Your monitoring shouldn’t either.
AI Agents as Visibility and Security Tools
When implemented correctly into a network security strategy, AI could prove to be a valuable tool in extending security teams’ visibility and monitoring. Here are some benefits I see from using AI:
Proactive threat detection – AI’s pattern recognition can help teams identify potential anomalies early – for example, spikes in network traffic during off times that would indicate someone is moving data.
Intelligent traffic routing – AI can help automate and streamline traffic flows by identifying patterns on a much more granular level.
Automated root cause analysis – AI can decrease mean time to resolution (MTTR), saving overhead, time, and energy.
Implementing AI into your visibility framework is not without its challenges, including:
Data privacy and compliance risks – As recent incidents have shown, introducing AI can also introduce unknown vulnerabilities and compliance risk when AI agents are given too much access. Make sure your security policies guard data access for AI agents as well as human users.
Model transparency and explainability – Visibility needs to extend to the workings of AI itself: its threat detection and decision-making process.
Integration with legacy systems – To monitor an entire network, any AI solutions need to be able to integrate with legacy systems, including on-premises environments.
You can’t protect what you can’t see. However, if you can achieve and maintain network visibility across your environment, you can find and eliminate potential threats before they can do any damage.
Network visibility isn't just about collecting data – it's about creating a unified defense strategy where each monitoring layer tells part of the story, but together they reveal the complete narrative of what's happening in your environment. In cybersecurity, the full story is what saves you.
Want to improve your visibility strategy? Start with these fundamentals—and build a system that sees everything.
Curious about how to strengthen your cloud network visibility? Check out Aviatrix’s free security assessment to learn how your network defenses can be stronger.
