The pull of data gravity

In the physical world, gravity pulls matter together. In the digital world, data gravity describes a similar phenomenon: as data accumulates, it attracts applications, services, and users to where it resides. The more data a cloud region holds, the more dependent an organization becomes on it.

This growing gravitational pull isn’t just metaphorical; it has tangible consequences for performance, cost, and security. The farther your workloads and monitoring tools are from the source of data, the slower, riskier, and more expensive your analysis becomes.

The problem with centralized inspection

As more organizations migrate workloads to the cloud, a common reflex has been to centralize inspection, mirroring all traffic to a single cloud location for analysis. While this simplifies tool management, it also introduces serious trade-offs:

• Latency & cost: Transferring petabytes of mirrored traffic to the cloud can cost more in bandwidth than it saves in visibility.
  
  
• Security & compliance risk: Sensitive data traversing external links increases exposure to interception and breaches.
  
  
• Blind spots: East-west traffic inside on-prem or edge environments often remains invisible once focus shifts entirely to the cloud.

Recent high-profile cloud breaches, such as the September 2025 attacks affecting manufacturers worldwide, have reminded us that even major providers can’t guarantee full isolation or protection. Data sovereignty and segmentation still matter.

What data should be kept locally

Not all data belongs in the cloud. Certain types of network traffic and analysis are far better handled at the edge, where the data originates:

• High-bandwidth packet captures for troubleshooting or forensics.
• Latency-sensitive operations, such as real-time monitoring or intrusion detection.
• Regulated or private data flows, where compliance prohibits external mirroring.
• Pre-filtered telemetry, where only summaries or enriched metadata should go to the cloud.

Performing edge capture and pre-analysis reduces both the amount and sensitivity of data transmitted upward, letting teams send only what matters to cloud analytics tools.

The hybrid reality: both cloud and physical are good

Cloud migration isn’t just about moving applications and workloads. It also changes how you monitor them. The question isn’t whether your infrastructure should be in the cloud or on-premises, but how your visibility architecture adapts to both.

The most resilient organizations understand that cloud and physical monitoring work best together.

• Keep raw packet capture and first-stage analysis close to the source. Profitap’s physical TAPs, Network Packet Brokers (NPBs), and IOTA provide full-fidelity visibility into on-prem and edge traffic.
  
  
• Use the cloud for correlation, AI-driven anomaly detection, and cross-site analytics. These higher-level insights benefit from aggregated context across distributed environments.

This hybrid approach ensures you maintain complete visibility by capturing data locally, analyzing intelligently, and correlating globally.

Profitap’s edge and cloud solutions

Profitap’s visibility portfolio makes a distributed, hybrid monitoring approach both practical and unified. From edge capture to cloud analytics, our solutions provide full-fidelity visibility across every layer of modern infrastructure.

• Physical TAPs: Reliable, lossless access to packet-level data from on-prem and industrial networks, ensuring visibility without performance impact.
  
  
• Profitap vTAP & Cloud TAP: Extend visibility into VMware, Kubernetes, and hybrid cloud environments. Monitor east-west traffic across virtual and containerized workloads, and integrate seamlessly with centralized tools.
  
  
• Network Packet Brokers (NPBs): Aggregate, filter, and distribute traffic from multiple sources. With features like tunnel creation / termination, crucial for bridging physical on-premises networks with cloud environments, and advanced filtering capabilities, NPBs serve as the core of a scalable observability architecture.
  
  
• IOTA: All-in-one capture, analysis, and storage at the edge for local troubleshooting, real-time monitoring, and historical analysis without cloud dependency.
  
  

Together, these tools ensure that wherever your data lives, you retain visibility and control without compromise.

Enhancing risk mitigation and operational resilience

Implementing an edge-first visibility strategy enables organizations to:

• Localize breach containment, effectively isolating incidents and restricting lateral movement.
• Reduce expenses associated with cloud data transfers by minimizing unnecessary uplink traffic.
• Preserve data sovereignty by retaining control over sensitive network flows at the source.
• Expedite root-cause analysis by diminishing reliance on centralized data paths and accelerating investigative workflows.

The cloud isn’t the enemy; overcentralization is.
Profitap empowers organizations to monitor and secure their networks wherever data resides, combining edge intelligence with cloud visibility. Whether your packets flow through fiber, copper, virtual machines, or Kubernetes clusters, Profitap ensures that gravity works for you, not against you.