Riverbed introduces a number of solutions to improve the performance of Microsoft’s cloud-based collaboration applications.
As a result of the current pandemic, employees are more likely to work from home and use cloud-based applications, especially collaboration applications. This has consequences for the quality and user experience of these specific applications.
It is a significant challenge for IT administrators to uphold this user experience and the quality of the connections. Because employees mostly work from outside the office, and the applications are accessed from the cloud, IT administrators have little control over the quality of the data traffic once it leaves the company network. This makes it difficult to solve potential problems, mainly because it’s now impossible to control the bandwidth.
Cloud-based WAN optimization
This is where Riverbed’s WAN optimization products and services come in handy. This will accelerate, among other things, the data traffic of applications between data centers and, for example, branch offices. Riverbed also provides these ‘acceleration services’ for data traffic coming from hybrid and multicloud environments.
Riverbed offers its CloudAccelerator solution that speeds up Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) traffic. More specifically, this involves a virtual SteelHead WAN optimization appliance that is deployed in the IaaS environment. This virtual appliance speeds up the traffic of cloud-based workloads to any desired endpoint whether this is an on-premise data center, a branch office or an endpoint device such as a laptop or smartphone. Cloud acceleration physically reduces the amount of data traffic going to and from the cloud environment.
Enhanced SaaS Application Optimization
In order to improve the quality and better manage traffic to and from the collaboration cloud applications, Riverbed has now announced an update, version 1.2, of its SaaS Accelerator solution.
SaaS Accelerator works similarly to Cloud Accelerator, but more specifically for SaaS services. Version 1 is already an existing service and focuses mainly on basic Office 365 file sharing, Box, ServiceNow, Salesforce and Veeva.
SaaS Accelerator 1.2
Version 1.2 now specifically extends this service to the cloud-based collaboration tools of Microsoft, Office 365 and Dynamics CRM. These applications are particularly useful for employees working from home.
All Office 365 applications are managed, including SharePoint, Exchange, Office WebApps and the Dynamics CRM solution. The Riverbed solution now supports up to 50.000 simultaneous users per application and instance. Also, version 1.2 should accelerate the performance of Office 365 by up to ten times.
In addition, the solution now offers a fully managed software-based Enterprise Content Delivery (eCDN) component for Microsoft Teams, Stream Live events and on-demand video. This Riverbed-managed component also helps remove a lot of data from the network.