Best Practices for Improving Hybrid and Multicloud Performance

Success in the cloud depends less on adoption and more on agility. Recent industry trends point to emerging data management challenges across cloud service providers and legacy infrastructure, often all at once. This requires a shift in how organizations approach cloud strategies—strategically and proactively.

Modern Infrastructure Needs Modern Approaches

The future of compute is distributed, scalable, and decentralized. Most organizations now run a mix of public cloud, private infrastructure, and on-premises systems. These environments generate different types of data, follow different policies, and offer varying levels of observability and visibility into networks.

According to Flexera’s 2025 “State of the Cloud Report,” 86 percent of IT leaders manage multicloud environments (see Figure 1), and nearly half of all workloads and data now reside in public cloud infrastructure, often running in containers orchestrated by Kubernetes. The speed and scale of these deployments outpace the capabilities of many legacy monitoring tools.

While that allows for flexibility, every cloud dollar is expected to drive measurable business value. Many enterprises fall into the trap of cloud waste due to:

• Overprovisioned resources
• Idle or orphaned workloads
• Incomplete data transfers
• Poor governance of monolithic and legacy apps

Cloud-native monitoring tools rarely provide sufficient end-to-end visibility for organizations to understand how infrastructure, network traffic, and applications perform as an ecosystem. Organizations need to shift from piecemeal views to a more connected, cross-environmental monitoring strategy.

Cloud Migration Is a Milestone, Not the Finish Line

The hardest part of migrating to the cloud begins before services go live.

Cloud workloads are ephemeral, dynamic, and segmented, with constantly shifting traffic patterns. Autoscaling may hide problems until they spike, and microservices, along with artificial intelligence (AI) agents, introduce latency in ways that are hard to predict. Continuous monitoring before, during, and after cloud migration is essential. Otherwise, performance degradations can go unnoticed until users are impacted, making it much harder to understand what changed or how to fix it.

In fact, Flexera research shows that migration has become a key benchmark for gauging the success of cloud strategies. In just one year, the number of organizations measuring progress by workloads migrated to the cloud more than doubled, rising from 36 percent to 78 percent (see Figure 2).

IT teams should evaluate their monitoring strategy early. As services become more interconnected, isolating problems becomes more difficult—especially without consistent, real-time data insights. Too often, teams rely on third-party APIs that limit them to narrow, vendor-specific views. This approach can create network performance issues, particularly in environments that use containers, route across hybrid infrastructure, or face network security challenges.

High-Fidelity Data Is Critical in Dynamic Environments

Context matters just as much as coverage. Organizations can collect logs and metrics from every service and still miss the most important signals if those data streams aren’t consistent or complete. The difference between a minor slowdown and a major incident often comes down to the quality of the data feeding business initiatives.

Packet data plays a key role. Enterprise Management Associates' (EMA) “Enterprise Strategies for Hybrid, Multi-Cloud Networks” report found that 52 percent of enterprises now use packet data for performance monitoring and observability in hybrid and multicloud environments (see Figure 3). That number is expected to grow as more organizations recognize how valuable this visibility is—especially in environments where traffic is encrypted, workloads are containerized, and infrastructure shifts constantly.

Real-time packet-level insights provide a unified, granular source of truth for networkwide troubleshooting, revealing exactly what users are experiencing, how applications respond, and where and why delays or failures occur. Packet data isn’t just for after-the-fact analysis; it’s essential for proactive monitoring, baseline modeling, and early-warning alerts.

Disconnected Tools Lead to Slower Resolution

Despite investments in monitoring tools, too many organizations still rely on disconnected platforms with incompatible data definitions and alerting standards across network, cloud, security, and application domains. Improving service performance becomes more difficult when teams waste time comparing dashboards, reviewing logs, or chasing down root causes. This increases mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and negatively impacts customer experience.

According to EMA, only 25 percent of organizations feel they’ve been fully successful at managing hybrid and multicloud environments, and just 29 percent are satisfied with their current observability capabilities (see Figures 4 and 5). That leaves a wide gap, and a big opportunity, for organizations willing to rethink their approach.

Centralizing observability requires a shared data foundation—one that provides reliable, end-to-end visibility across systems and environments and supports collaboration between teams without adding more noise.

Improve Cloud Performance and Reliability With NETSCOUT

Performance should scale with cloud strategies, not degrade because of them.

NETSCOUT helps organizations reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR), lower MTTK, improve network and application performance, and strengthen their security posture with high-quality, actionable Smart Data derived from deep-packet inspection. With solutions including nGeniusONE, InfiniStreamNG, vSTREAM, and remote observability appliances, IT teams can monitor public and hybrid cloud infrastructure, remote sites, on-premises environments, and legacy systems in real time; respond to problems faster; and maintain performance across the entire cloud ecosystem.

Download a complimentary copy of NETSCOUT’s full EMA report from our website. To learn more about how NETSCOUT solutions can help improve cloud performance, visit our cloud performance monitoring page.