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An interview with Van Symons, CTO of Visual One Intelligence.
IT infrastructure teams face growing challenges with hybrid environments, limited resources, and increasing demands. We recently sat down with Van Symons, CTO of Visual One Intelligence, to discuss how infrastructure management is changing and what teams need to succeed in this new landscape.
The Growing Complexity of Hybrid Environments
When asked about the biggest challenges facing infrastructure teams today, Symons didn’t hesitate: “The number one thing I see is greater and greater complexity in the infrastructure environment. More choices, whether it’s on-prem, in the cloud, etc., and then not enough time to do all the things they need to do to manage and see everything across this breadth of deployment options.”
This complexity isn’t going away. As more organizations settle into hybrid infrastructures—with some workloads in the cloud and others remaining on-premises—teams need better ways to maintain visibility while optimizing resources.
From Invisible to Visible: The Financial Evolution
One of the most significant shifts has been in how organizations view infrastructure costs. While on-premises infrastructure has always represented a significant investment, its costs weren’t as immediately visible as cloud expenses.
“Cloud costs real money,” Symons explains. “The choices you make on-prem, for example. Simple things like I can over-provision something if I’m not using resources. If I deploy the same thing to the cloud, it costs money.”
This situation is analogous to the difference between owning a car and using a rideshare service. When you own a car, you make a large upfront payment but may not fully account for each individual trip’s cost. With a rideshare, you’re acutely aware of every dollar spent on each journey.
This heightened awareness is driving a shift toward more deliberate financial planning across both environments. FinOps principles once applied primarily to cloud resources are now extending to on-premises infrastructure – a trend Symons believes will continue to grow.
The Changing Nature of Infrastructure Management
Infrastructure management has transformed dramatically over the past 15 years. Today’s teams face increasing pressure with fewer resources and often less specialized knowledge.
“What I see is there’s less time to manage infrastructure, and the skill level is lower. So people need tools to automate and predict where things are going,” Symons notes. “Infrastructure is getting more complex as well.”
This reality has led to what one customer described as needing to “do 10% more with 10% less every year forever.” The traditional model of having specialists for each infrastructure domain—storage, compute, networking—is giving way to generalists who must handle multiple areas simultaneously.
Moving Beyond Traditional Monitoring
A key insight from our conversation was the limitations of traditional infrastructure monitoring. Most organizations are drowning in alerts and data but starving for actionable insights.
“Monitoring is just the five-minute data,” Symons explains. “Our analytics is how we analyze this to tell you and give you insight where to go spend time.”
While many tools offer “real-time monitoring,” this approach can create more problems than it solves, generating excessive alerts without meaningful context. Instead, Visual One focuses on proactive identification of sustained issues and trends, looking at long-term patterns rather than momentary spikes.
“A spike is one thing, but a trend is another,” says Symons. “We actually do the trend work for you and tell you based on your current trends—if things continue as they are—in three and a half months, you’re going to reach a capacity limit.”
The Value of Integration: Beyond APM Tools
When comparing infrastructure monitoring with application performance monitoring (APM), Symons highlighted the limitations of seeing only part of the puzzle.
“If you’re in an APM environment, you know it’s this particular API in this particular section, but you don’t see the full picture of the hardware,” he explains. By contrast, solutions that integrate hardware and software visibility provide complete context, which can rapidly identify root causes that might otherwise remain hidden.
One customer shared that “it usually takes me 40 hours to find the problem and 40 minutes to fix it. You just eliminated the front end 40 hours.” This dramatic efficiency gain comes from having comprehensive visibility across the entire infrastructure stack.
The Future of Hybrid Infrastructure Management
Looking ahead, Symons predicts we’ll see more hybrid environments, not fewer. “I think we’ll see more of a blended hybrid approach to be efficient in both cost as well as in my resources and maybe even in security as well.”
This hybrid approach requires a unified management strategy that can optimize, identify, and predict—the three focal points Symons emphasizes:
- Optimize: Improve efficiency in costs, infrastructure, and team time
- Identify: Pinpoint not just where to spend time, but also where not to spend time
- Predict: Anticipate future needs and challenges before they become problems
Conclusion: A New Approach for New Challenges
As infrastructure environments continue to grow in complexity, the old ways of manual management and reactive monitoring are no longer sustainable. Organizations need intelligent analytics that can provide meaningful, actionable insights without requiring constant attention.
The future belongs to solutions that consolidate visibility across hybrid environments, automate the discovery and diagnosis of issues, and provide the predictive intelligence teams need to stay ahead of problems rather than just reacting to them.
By embracing this shift from reactive to proactive infrastructure management, today’s teams can do more with less—turning the challenge of increasing complexity into an opportunity for greater efficiency and performance.
About Visual One Intelligence®
Visual One Intelligence® is an infrastructure tool with a unique approach—guaranteeing better & faster monitoring, observability, and FinOps insights by leveraging resource-level metrics across your hybrid infrastructure.
By consolidating independent data elements into unified metrics, Visual One’s platform correlates and interprets hybrid infrastructure data to illuminate cost-saving and operations-sustaining details that otherwise stay hidden.
These insights lead to less downtime, lower costs, better planning, and more efficient architectures.
