Riverbed announced the availability of new capabilities that dramatically improve the visibility and performance of SSL/TLS-encrypted applications, enabling organizations to expand Work-from-Anywhere, SaaS and Cloud initiatives with confidence.

The modern IT landscape has grown more distributed, hybrid and complex, which has created visibility and performance challenges and significantly expanded the risk perimeter for cyber-attacks. Additionally, as organizations continue to drive more traffic to the Web, of which 85% is encrypted, the process of managing encryption certificates is far more burdensome for IT. Riverbed's unified visibility solution, which already plays a crucial role in enabling organizations to identity and mitigate cybersecurity threats, now provides greater visibility and insight into encrypted traffic, and new application performance software will automate the acceleration of encrypted applications to improve business productivity and user experience in a secure manner. Today's enhancements include: 

• Visibility to Bolster the Fight Against Security Threats Before, During, After They Arise - Riverbed AppResponse - part of Riverbed's unified visibility solutions portfolio - now provides: Certificate Insights that highlight which SSL/TLS certificates are being used, by whom, or close to expiring; Handshake Insights that show which SSL/TLS versions and ciphers are being used, by whom, and to track session renegotiations or errors; and support for PFS (Perfect Forward Secrecy) to retain deep packet visibility and analysis while preserving a hardened security posture. Deeper inspection of SSL traffic allows IT to properly troubleshoot and respond to security incidents more comprehensively.

• Accelerate Encrypted Apps by Up to 10X or More: Any User, Network, App, Anywhere - New software updates to Riverbed SteelHead and Riverbed Client Accelerator provide zero-touch acceleration of any SSL/TLS encrypted applications with no manual collection, creation or distribution of the growing number of encryption certificates and keys; and deliver an up to 10X performance boost of SSL/TLS encrypted applications with up to 99% less bandwidth.
  

"With business initiatives expanding the threat plane - and cyber-attacks like the recent SUNBURST on the rise - our public sector and enterprise customers have a heightened concern regarding security," said Vincent Berk, CTO and Chief Security Architect at Riverbed. "While encrypted applications protect a company's data, they previously reduced visibility and blocked inspections, and significantly complicated acceleration. The latest updates to Riverbed's Unified NPM and Application Acceleration solutions deliver the visibility organizations need into encrypted traffic, and enable them to securely accelerate that traffic with an automated approach instead of unwieldy, manual processes. Only Riverbed offers solutions that can be used collaboratively by both network and security teams to address security, visibility and performance challenges in a hyperconnected and hybrid world. This is essential to building secure and high-performance enterprise networks." 

"In today's hyper-connected world, the quality of the user experience and the integrity of network exchanges are two critical determinants of digital success. Organizations must be both precise and proactive in managing the performance and security of their networked environment. With product offerings like those introduced by Riverbed, IT gains high-value insights that drive improvements in problem resolution, threat mitigation, and performance management. These insights not only boost service levels, but also the effectiveness and teamwork of network and security operations." said Mark Leary, Research Director for Network Analytics at IDC. "Complete visibility enables comprehensive analysis, resulting in rapid and accurate identification of root causes, detection of network anomalies, and optimization of traffic movement. As organizations continue to drive more traffic over the Internet and across cloud services, the ability to fully view and accelerate encrypted traffic is crucial, and assures there are no trade-offs between security and performance - for IT or the business."

Expand Insights Into the Security of the Network

Visibility is a cornerstone of any good security practice, and providing a persistent, unified view of the complete IT network is table stakes for combatting sophisticated cybersecurity threats. Riverbed helps break through modern IT complexity with full-fidelity, unified network performance management (NPM) that collects every packet and every flow from every device (on-premises, remote or in the cloud) 100% of the time, collates this and provides a holistic portal view for deep analysis and insights. Riverbed's visibility solutions bolster the effectiveness of threat hunting, incident response and forensics to help organizations maintain a hardened security posture.

Expanding upon recent AppResponse updates that give operators the ability to track, report and validate the integrity of SSL/TLS sessions, certificates and cipher suites, Riverbed AppResponse now provides new insights into SSL/TLS certificate expiry status to bolster network security and assure user experience. Riverbed is widening this analysis to include SSL/TLS Certificates Insights and informing IT what kinds of certificates are being used within the network, their expiry status, and where they are used.

Boost Performance of Encrypted Applications and Pave the Way for Productive Hybrid Work

With the new releases of Riverbed SteelHead and Client Accelerator, accelerating encrypted applications is far simpler for IT to manage and more secure.​ Now, IT can simply enable SSL/TLS acceleration once and select which apps to accelerate to initiate zero-touch acceleration of encrypted apps for their teams and eliminate the burden of manually collecting, creating or distributing encryption certificates.

Client Accelerator improves productivity and user experience by accelerating the connections of laptops and their applications. As employees increasingly work from anywhere, Client Accelerator helps reduce network data congestion by up to 99% and offers up to 10X faster and more reliable performance for business-critical SaaS apps, on-prem applications and cloud workloads for users anywhere.

This new capability to automate the acceleration of encrypted applications is available at no additional cost to existing and new SteelHead and Client Accelerator customers with active service agreements.

For more information, visit: https://www.riverbed.com/solutions/security.html​