Riverbed looks to revolutionise networking in India with SD-WAN solution

It has the ability to replace thousands of manually configured routers with virtual network design

Taking a new approach to networking for the cloud era, application performance company Riverbed Technology has  introduced Riverbed SteelConnect, which aims to revolutionise networking in India.

The new SteelConnect solution is based on software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) that simplifies the design, deployment and management of enterprise networks. Also, the new software-defined, cloud managed and application-centric solution delivers big in terms of agility, visibility and performance that the businesses require to succeed in today’s digital market.

“Organisations in India are under tremendous pressure to transform digitally and to deliver more agile, simple, scalable and cost-efficient services to their customers,” said Nagendra Venkaswamy, Vice President, India and South Asia for Riverbed

The legacy approaches to networking, which were defined long before the inception of cloud networking, are based on hardware and thus are rigid and error-prone. The cloud market in India continues to grow at a rapid pace. The continued push for digitalisation by the Government of India through initiatives like Digital India and Smart City - as well as moves towards a ‘less cash’ society – is directly and indirectly fuelling this growth. While there have been major advancements in cloud computing, cloud storage and cloud apps, traditional networking has been left behind. In fact, Gartner reports reveal that 50% of cloud deployments will suffer from business-impacting performance issues, requiring extensive network redesign.

Riverbed SteeConnect addresses the pain points in legacy hardware-centric networking design that prevents businesses from moving forward and threatens their investments in digital transformation. 

Here are some of the benefits that the new Riverbed SteelConnect networking solution build for cloud offers:

• Unified connectivity, single-click and instant provisioning into cloud networks - SteelConnect is the industry’s first and only product to unify network connectivity and orchestration of application delivery across hybrid WANs (internet and MPLS), branch networks (LAN & WLAN), and cloud environments (IaaS & SaaS) such as AWS and Microsoft Azure – all through a complete line of WAN gateways, LAN switches, and Wi-Fi access points managed centrally from a cloud console.

• Business-aligned orchestration - Instead of managing networks through configuration of individual appliances, SteelConnect provides policy-based orchestration that is naturally aligned to the language and priorities of business: Applications, Users, Locations, Performance SLAs and Security requirements. An IT network architect can now easily set up global or local policies such as: send all video application traffic over the highest-capacity circuits; send software updates over Internet broadband circuits; or send all business traffic over secure VPNs. Previously network operators needed to enter hundreds or thousands of lines of CLI (command line interface) code to make network and application changes, which is both inefficient and prone to human error.

• Zero-touch provisioning - provides instant deployment of physical devices into a network. Central management of global network policies enables agile and efficient updates to support business requirements.

• Native routing - SteelConnect Gateways can be used in place of legacy branch routers to reduce the cost and complexity of managing connectivity to remote locations.

SteelConnect demo

SteelConnect Chalk Talk video
 

SteelConnect demo with Amazon’s Alexa