Riverbed announced key updates to its Network Performance Management (NPM) portfolio, delivering greater visibility that is crucial to monitoring productivity and performance, as organizations continue to shift toward hybrid-networks and work-from-anywhere models. Riverbed NPM-the leading and only unified network visibility solution that spans on-premises, multi-cloud and remote work environments-now includes: more cloud options, increased visibility and analysis of encrypted traffic, and use of artificial intelligence (AI) for behavioral analytics of packets, apps and users for automatically defining baselines and outliers. Additionally, with Riverbed NPM solutions, organizations can now also create customized dashboards that provide IT and business leaders with real-time insights into overall app performance and the connectivity infrastructure critical for remote working.

IT responsibilities were already stretched far beyond conventional network boundaries due to the rise of cloud and hybrid networks. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses also now need more visibility into hybrid and distributed workforces as users are increasingly connecting beyond corporate networks and facilities and working from anywhere. In Riverbed's Future of Work Survey, 37 percent of business leaders surveyed said they needed better visibility into network and application performance to ensure a better remote work environment, as increased visibility provides greater insight into business productivity and performance. Even after COVID-19 passes, remote working and distributed workforces are expected to see a sharp increase from the past-growing to 600 million remote employees by 2024, up from 343 million in 2019.

"This rise in remote work has not only led to much more geographically dispersed organizations, but to a significant increase in SaaS apps and cloud-based services, which has in turn exposed major gaps in visibility across the hybrid landscape," said Rich McBee, CEO of Riverbed. "With IT and digital performance linked to the overall business performance of an enterprise, our customers rely on Riverbed NPM solutions to assure the reliability, security and performance of their networks as no other visibility solution can measure every single packet, and flow, across all devices and networks. With the innovations we're announcing today, and our application acceleration solutions to drive performance, we're making it easier than ever before for enterprises to have the tools to deliver productivity across the business, even in the face of unprecedented network complexity and an increasingly work-from-anywhere world. We're excited to be joined by more than 1,000 customers and partners at Riverbed's Global User Conference, to share exciting new solutions and to provide training for IT leaders to help organizations maximize performance and visibility for any user, network and application, anywhere."

"More broadly than ever before, the digital enterprise is spread across on-prem, IaaS, SaaS and work-from-anywhere environments. Many NPM tools monitor only some of these environments, leaving big gaps in understanding for IT leaders," said Dante Malagrino, Chief Development Officer, at Riverbed. "In the latest release of Riverbed's unified NPM solution, we updated the industry's most trusted solution to collect and analyze even more information, delivering powerful new insights into encrypted traffic and user activity. Coupled with new behavioral analytics and anomaly detection, Riverbed NPM continues to provide the most holistic and normalized view throughout the enterprise network for efficient troubleshooting and decision-making."

"Organizations have accelerated digital transformation initiatives to adjust to the new normal - a highly distributed work force and applications environment. ESG research highlights that the top goals of these initiatives are to drive greater operational efficiencies and deliver differentiated customer experiences, yet many struggle with the increased complexity and lack of visibility in these dispersed environments," stated Bob Laliberte, Senior Analyst, ESG. "Riverbed's enhanced cloud and AI solutions enable organizations to deliver positive application experiences and increased productivity for remote workers, while the holistic visibility and centralized cloud-based portal means operations can quickly regain control of these highly complex and distributed environments."

Additionally, with the digital enterprise spread across on-prem, IaaS, SaaS and work-from-anywhere environments and with many workers using their own devices and connecting to company networks using personal WiFi connections or mobile data, attack areas and vulnerabilities have increased. In order to safeguard these newly exposed environments and manage their expanded workloads, IT and security pros need to have unobstructed visibility as explained by customer Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation:

"If we did not have the level of visibility achieved with Riverbed NPM, we would have had to examine data from all affected devices to determine exactly where the attack originated," said Bryan Juan, Senior Network Tools Architect at Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation. "Instead of resolving the security breach in a couple of hours, we would have still been spending time during the week."

New Cloud and High-Availability Deployment Options

Network operators now have the ability to deploy Riverbed NetProfiler, Flow Gateway and NetIM services directly in the cloud, eliminating the need to procure and deploy physical servers on-premises. Cloud instances provide the same high scale and user experience, with up to 6 million flows per minute (FPM) on Flow Gateway and up to 30 million flows per minute on NetProfiler. Support for cloud deployment includes Azure, Azure Government, AWS and AWS GovCloud.

In addition, NetIM adds robust high availability capabilities to ensure that real-time insight into the health and performance of IT infrastructure is as robust as the infrastructure itself.

Artificial Intelligence Powers Behavioral Analytics of Packets, Apps & Users

A new set of powerful reporting capabilities make it easier than ever to track what's most important throughout robust and geographically dispersed networks:

• New Adaptive Thresholds​ for AppResponse uses behavioral analytics or AI to automatically create baselines and detect and flag abnormal changes in server response times and total throughput, enabling organizations to address the most critical performance challenges, while eliminating operational overhead associated with unimportant or unactionable alerts and reducing security risks associated with human error or oversight.
• NetProfiler introduces AD Connector 3.0 to automatically associate user names from Active Directory with flagged IP addresses for inclusion in reports, simplifying troubleshooting and providing business relevance to insights.
• NetProfiler expands integration with Riverbed SteelHead with support for custom application groups and enhanced reporting of inbound Network QoS, helping you find and fix performance issues for critical apps, including critical, work-from-home collaboration apps like voice and video, with a unified platform.

Increased Visibility & Insight into Encrypted Traffic Flows

The ubiquity of encrypted network traffic has made it harder for network operators to retain deep visibility into packets, which increases the risk of malicious threats and malware going undetected on the network.

Riverbed AppResponse now provides enhanced insight into encrypted network traffic, including support for Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), giving operators the ability to track, report and validate the integrity of SSL/TLS sessions, certificates and cipher suites. Being able to see and track TLS handshake metrics, such as out-of-date TLS certificates, can help ensure that private data, like personal or financial information, is not easily susceptible to theft.