Artificial intelligence and SD-WAN

emmamegan

Cisco is unlikely to be enthusiastic about Riverbed's current announcement of the SteelConnect EX Series, as are security providers. The manufacturer is integrating extensive routing and security functions into the latest expansion of its SD-WAN and WAN acceleration products, which are to be expanded over time.

Riverbed, traditionally coming from WAN acceleration, had already built basic routing functions into the SteelConnect CX series. It is aimed at the market segment below large international companies, cloud providers, carriers and system integrators. With the EX variant, functionality and target group are adjusted upwards.

The motivation for this product development is obvious: Infrastructures are becoming more and more complex. In addition to the head office, they have long since included branches, mobile systems, one or more cloud providers with SaaS, PaaS or IaaS offers, and perhaps external secondary data centers. The networks are becoming more and more extensive and have long included different connection types: from the protected MPLS connection via Internet connectivity and VPNs to mobile connections via the public provider networks.

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At the same time, the importance of infrastructure for business success is increasing: Customers who are not served quickly enough on the web go elsewhere, complex architectures scale poorly at the crucial moment and thus block extended business activities. Often enough, user problems can only be solved by an erratic and time-consuming search for the source of the error, which is not always successful. Then the next workaround follows.

"This brings with it three fundamental challenges: Infrastructure management is becoming more and more difficult, performance is no longer reliably predictable, and after all, users today also have high expectations of the user experience in corporate infrastructure, which often goes hand in hand with a loss in security," said Michael Rudrich, Vice President Central Europe on the occasion of the product presentation to press representatives in Munich. "We address this with SteelConnect EX through functions for the areas of SD-WAN, security and WAN optimization."