E-Business

Why Your Company Needs Cloud Visibility

Published

6 years ago

June 22, 2020

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As organizations migrate to the cloud, they outsource the management of their computing infrastructure to cloud service providers. These specialized firms take care of the complex engineering involved, and allow their client businesses focus on their core operations.

But there’s often a tradeoff involved. When you ask cloud firms to look after segments of your IT, you risk losing your hold on the system. You may be unable to tell where critical functions are located, or where a security breach has occurred.

The IT person has a phrase for this. It’s called a loss of cloud visibility.

What is Cloud Visibility?

Cloud visibility is having a good view of the activity in your cloud, such that you can spot inefficient performance and security lapses in your cloud setup. It’s being able to access the data you want from your clouds.

You can maintain high visibility of your IT environment if the supporting infrastructure is located on-premise. In this scenario, you have complete control of your security. You can implement measures to keep costs down. And you could also assess performance in real time, and enforce corrections as quickly as you like.

But with the cloud, there’s a potential limit to your powers. A service provider runs your cloud setup on your behalf. They control the data centers that store your data, and are also in charge of the data that travels through their networks.

Cloud visibility is about retaining a good deal of your IT infrastructure while they are hosted by an expert third party—a blending of the benefits from both on-premise setups and service provider’s data centers.

Why is Cloud Visibility Important?

We have already hinted at some of the benefits of greater cloud visibility. Let’s look at them in a little detail:

Performance Tracking

You may think that you don’t need to actively monitor the performance of your clouds or networks if there’s a specialized service provider doing this for you.

But there are performance issues that may arise, which you will only be able to solve if you have good visibility of what goes on with your cloud.

Here’s an example. You may want to know what your cloud traffic is like. If there’s a fall in cloud traffic, it could indicate deteriorating quality of service to your customers from your end. But unless you’re tracking this, you may not be aware that it’s happening.

Security

Firewalls and threat detection systems will work for on-premise computing infrastructure. But it’s not sufficient for cloud environments. Because cloud infrastructure is sprawling and elastic, your security team may find it hard to watch over everything that goes on with it.

If you achieve greater visibility of your cloud, you will be better able to spot security lapses and fix them soon enough.

Managed Costs

Increased visibility lets you discover underutilized resources and waste in your cloud setup.

For instance, there may be unused capacity in your cloud. Or a significant amount of workloads on your clouds could be non-productive. You will be paying for these things, despite the fact that they aren’t contributing to growth in your organization.

When you have a good view of the underutilization or excess capacity in your systems, you can adjust them to improve efficiency and scale back capacity. This saves you time and money.

What Hinders Cloud Visibility?

These are some of the factors that restrict cloud visibility.

Scale

The cloud is attractive because of its scalability. But scaling up comes with some risks. If you increase capacity, you will have a broader spread of infrastructure to monitor. You could even be managing multi-clouds. That’s more difficult to manage than a fixed on-premise data center.

An expanded IT infrastructure throws up security challenges as well. When there are so many different segments to look after, it’s possible that certain security vulnerabilities will go undetected. It will be difficult to achieve a uniform application of security policy.

Even when your team detects a problem, they could struggle to locate the source because of the scale of the cloud setup.

Control

Many businesses assume that it’s alright to relinquish control of their cloud to managed service firms. But this approach can be counterproductive.

Companies that use public cloud don’t own the data centers on which their data gets stored. They also don’t control the networks that their data runs through. This automatically limits what they can learn about their clouds.

There’s nothing wrong with cloud service providers managing and running cloud setup on a company’s behalf. That company will benefit from their expertise, and from the time and resources that it will save by outsourcing to them. But this doesn’t mean that it should stop paying attention to its clouds.

Inadequate Visibility Tools

There are tools that allow you to monitor your workloads on cloud platforms. But it’s not enough to just have a tool. It has to be something that you as a customer can use. Some cloud service providers will avail their clients of visibility solutions, but these are often not service-centric enough to work for clients.

The effort required to evaluate and choose visibility tools may also discourage businesses from using them.

How to Improve Your Cloud Visibility

These are the steps you can take to improve cloud visibility.

Adopt a Shared Responsibility Model

Service providers will usually take care of the security surrounding your cloud. But it’s up to you to regulate what happens within your cloud environment. This is what a shared-responsibility model in cloud service provision looks like.

Your in-house IT team has a role to play here. They should track your data, applications, and user activity within your organization. This lets you restrict the room for malicious actors to break into your networks.

Use Cloud Integration Solutions

The sheer variety of applications that run on your cloud could make it difficult for you to gain cloud visibility. You can deal with this issue by using a cloud integration platform. This solution enables real-time exchange of data between your on-site and cloud environments, as well as between various applications that your organization uses.

Train Your Team

Some of the issues you encounter with data and traffic monitoring may be happening because your employees aren’t skilled enough to manage the cloud environment.

This is something you want to fix, even before introducing cloud integration or monitoring tools. When your IT team is properly trained, they will be more efficient at monitoring your cloud resources.

Conclusion

Most discussions about cloud visibility focus on the technologies that can make it work. But trust between cloud service providers and their clients is also important. It’s key to implementing the shared responsibility that both you and your cloud service provider should have towards your infrastructure.

Layer3 takes this approach seriously. As a cloud service provider, we have served both clients in both the public and private sectors. No two organizations are the same. That’s why we work with each one of them to plan and deploy solutions that they meet their peculiar needs.

If you want a cloud provider partner that’s as much a partner as a vendor to your business, you can reach out to us. Send your questions via email to [email protected], and we will respond in the shortest possible time. To request a free demo of our services, contact us here.

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E-Business

Firm Discovered a New Corporate Phishing Technique using a Popular AI Web Development Platform

Published

4 days ago

June 11, 2026

Chike Onwuegbuchi

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Kaspersky has discovered that attackers have begun exploiting another legitimate service for malicious purposes – this time it is Tencent EdgeOne Pages, a platform for creating and hosting web applications.

Attackers are misusing its capabilities to generate phishing emails targeting corporate users. Previously Kaspersky has described similar attacks leveraging Google services and web applications generated by Bubble, an AI-powered app builder, to hunt for corporate credentials.

Employees across multiple industries including the industrial sector, sales, and government are among the targets. The goal of the attack is to steal login credentials for corporate resources. Over the past 30 days, the company’s experts have detected more than 8,000 phishing emails using this tactic, including messages in English, Korean, and Russian.

The Tencent EdgeOne Pages service is positioned as a platform for quickly creating and deploying web applications using AI. Scammers misuse it to generate and publish phishing pages in minutes with virtually no web development skills.

Attackers host phishing pages on EdgeOne’s legitimate cloud infrastructure and use trusted domains. As a result, such sites appear to be established and secure to many protective solutions, complicating the detection of such attacks.

How the attack begins

The user receives an email from the alleged “corporate email support team”. The message states that the account login credentials will expire in 48 hours, and that failure to update them may result in problems receiving or sending emails.

To avoid restrictions, the user is prompted to click a link and enter relevant information. Phishing emails are not limited to this narrative, and could deliver any corporate message, such as a message from the HR department or a notification of a received document that should be downloaded.

Clicking the link in the email opens a page with a form for entering the victim’s name, email address, and password. It is a simple design, with virtually no additional elements.

After the user enters their login and password, the data is transferred to a server controlled by the attackers.

“We are seeing a continuation of the trend in which attackers use AI and no-code platforms as part of their phishing infrastructure. We’ve previously observed a similar scheme using the Bubble platform, and here we have yet another example.

“While the communication used in these phishing attacks is typical and has been used before multiple times, the attack technique itself significantly lowers the barrier to entry for attackers and accelerates the creation of phishing resources.

“Previously this required at least basic web development skills, but now an infrastructure for fraudulent emails can be created in minutes,” comments Roman Dedenok, Anti-Spam Expert at Kaspersky.

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E-Business

Kaspersky Report Shows Early 2026 Witnessed an Increase in Cyberattacks on the Manufacturing Sector

Published

5 days ago

June 10, 2026

Chike Onwuegbuchi

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According to a new Kaspersky ICS CERT report, in Q1 2026 the percentage of industrial control systems (ICS) on which malicious objects were blocked reached 19.6% globally. Kaspersky security solutions blocked malware from 10,052 different malware families of various categories on industrial automation systems.

Regionally, the share of ICS computers that were attacked ranged from 27.4% in Africa to 9.1% in Northern Europe. Compared to the previous quarter, attacks on the manufacturing sector in Q1 increased in multiple regions, including in Europe and Asia.

Regional split

In terms of overall numbers across all industry sectors, five regions saw an increase in the share of attacked ICS computers in Q1 2026 compared to the previous quarter. These were Southern Europe, Russia, Northern Europe, Canada and Africa.

Industries

In Q1, biometric systems traditionally placed first in terms of the share of ICS computers on which malicious objects were blocked, at 26.4%. These systems commonly have Internet access, are used for email, and, in many cases, have minimal cybersecurity controls within the organisations that use these systems.

Regionally, Southern Europe leads the ranking based on the percentage figures for biometric systems, at 35.15%. Africa follows at 29.58%, and Central Asia comes in third at 28.53%.

In the manufacturing industry, Southeast Asia ranks first among regions in terms of the percentage of ICS computers attacked (23.21%), followed by Africa (21.36%) and South Asia (20.13%).

In 2025, Kaspersky and VDC Research estimated that in just the first three quarters of 2025 cyberattacks on manufacturing organisations via ransomware could have generated over $18 billion globally in losses. Actual business losses could have been even higher when factoring in supply-chain disruptions, reputational damage, and recovery expenses.

“Legacy operational technology systems remain deeply embedded in manufacturing environments, which makes them vulnerable. Supply chain complexity and branching of the trusted partner network expands the attack surface beyond the network perimeter.

Attackers are realising that targeting OT assets of an industrial enterprise is not rocket science, which is why factory shutdowns bring massive financial losses,” commented Evgeny Goncharov, Head of Kaspersky ICS CERT.

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E-Business

NDPC, Meta Launch 2-Year M-SIDP after Regulatory Settlement

Published

5 days ago

June 9, 2026

Ebere Melum-Nwogbo

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Nigeria Data Protection Commission (NDPC) has launched the Meta-Supported Initiatives for Data Protection (M-SIDP), a strategic programme aimed at strengthening data privacy awareness, regulatory compliance and institutional capacity across Nigeria’s digital ecosystem.

NDPC, Meta Launch 2-Year M-SIDP after Regulatory Settlement

The initiative follows the conclusion of regulatory proceedings involving Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, over concerns relating to the processing of personal data belonging to Nigerian users. The matter was resolved in 2025 through a court-approved settlement.

Under the agreement, Meta committed to supporting a two-year programme of public-facing data protection measures designed to advance the objectives of the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDP Act) 2023, the General Application and Implementation Directive (GAID), and the NDPC Strategic Roadmap and Action Plan (SRAP) 2023–2027.

Announcing the initiative, the Commission said the programme would strengthen safeguards for data subjects while promoting responsible data processing practices among organisations operating in Nigeria.

According to a statement signed by Itunu Dosekun, head of the NDPC Media Unit, the programme will focus on governance, research and development, safety and sustainability mechanisms for technology ecosystems, capacity building for Data Protection Officers (DPOs) and Data Protection Compliance Organisations (DPCOs), as well as public awareness campaigns targeted at vulnerable groups.

The Commission stated, “As part of the settlement, Meta committed to supporting a two-year programme of public-facing data protection measures that aligns with the objectives of the Nigeria Data Protection Act, 2023 (NDP Act), the NDP Act General Application and Implementation Directive (GAID) and the NDPC Strategic Roadmap and Action Plan (SRAP) 2023–2027.”

The NDPC stressed that the settlement does not limit its regulatory authority.

“Nothing in this settlement limits the Commission’s independent statutory powers as we continue to exercise our regulatory mandate in relation to data processing activities in Nigeria, in accordance with the NDP Act and other applicable laws,” it stated.

The development comes amid rising global scrutiny of technology companies over data privacy practices, with regulators in regions including the European Union and the United States tightening enforcement against breaches and non-compliance.

Nigeria has also intensified efforts to strengthen its privacy framework following the enactment of the Nigeria Data Protection Act in 2023, which established the NDPC as an independent regulator empowered to monitor compliance, investigate violations and impose sanctions.

Industry experts warn that increasing digital adoption across banking, telecommunications, e-commerce, healthcare and public services has heightened risks of identity theft, cybercrime and unauthorised data sharing.

The NDPC has in recent years stepped up enforcement actions against organisations that violate data protection rules, while also expanding accreditation for Data Protection Compliance Organisations and training for privacy professionals.

The Meta-supported initiative is expected to address gaps in public awareness and technical capacity, while also supporting research and policy development on emerging issues such as artificial intelligence, cross-border data transfers and platform governance.

The Commission said it would provide periodic updates on the implementation of the programme and called on stakeholders to support efforts to build a secure, transparent and accountable privacy ecosystem in Nigeria.

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