Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology has announced enhancements to its Riverbed Optimization System and Cascade products, which company officials say provide "business-level visibility and control for all types of traffic and applications." 

As these organizations "go beyond connecting the dots to reliance on the network as a critical business asset," Riverbed officials explain, "they are demanding not only better application performance, but the ability to both understand how IT resources are being used and to apply fine-grained resource allocation." 

Which is why company officials feel that with the upcoming releases of version 9.0 of Cascade, with its network and application performance analysis and visibility, and version 6.5 of RiOS, which powers the company’s wide area network optimization tools, Riverbed will provide the functionality that "extends visibility from the network engineer all the way to the C-suite and gives IT the ability to allocate resources based on the business needs of enterprises."

Joe Skorupa, research vice president at Gartner (News - Alert), agrees that with a widening variety of applications and services distributed over the network, "enterprises require better insight into application performance to make intelligent IT decisions that further business goals. Robust traffic management capabilities such as QoS classification and enforcement are required to prioritize business-critical traffic in order to deliver essential services that keep the business running."

In November, TMC's (News - Alert) Tammy Wolf wrote that two new cloud-based product were introduced by IT performance firm Riverbed Technology to deliver anytime, anywhere IT performance to globally connected enterprises, without modifications to their current communications. This, combined with Riverbed’s WAN optimization and visibility portfolio, "will provide highly-efficient, secure and accelerated IT for both applications and storage in public cloud environments."

The Riverbed Cloud Steelhead was built to both speeds the move of data to the public cloud, as well as advance performance for cloud-hosted applications by allowing for instant access to that data and applications from any location.?