Hybrid WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

Riverbed (News - Alert) Technology is at the AWS Public Sector Summit this week in Washington, D.C., showcasing its software-defined and visibility solutions. That includes its SteelConnect SD-WAN solution.

SteelConnect can help federal agencies and others unify management and policy-based orchestration across cloud resources like Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), data centers, local area networks, and wide area networks. Riverbed, which launched SteelConnect in October, bills it as a quick, easy, and secure way to connect to public clouds like AWS.

“To realize the vision of federal IT modernization and digital transformation, the underlying network infrastructure must evolve alongside innovations in application development and service delivery,” said Davis Johnson, vice president of U.S. public sector at Riverbed Technology. “Cloud applications often find their speed limited by congestion and latency, as workloads travel from various remote offices to trusted internet connections and finally to the cloud. To accurately achieve desired performance goals, agencies need tools that enable them to easily predict performance constraints so prioritized investments can be made to avoid them.”

Various sources indicate that the SD-WAN space will reach $3.2 billion by 2018, $12.1 billion by 2019, and $7.5 billion by 2020. And a new study published this week by International Data Corp. suggests that SD-WAN revenues in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa will grow at an average pace of 92 percent year to reach $2.1 billion by 2021.

"SD-WAN has emerged as one of the hottest topics in the WAN industry," said Jan Hein Bakkers, senior research manager at IDC (News - Alert). "It will become one of the key building blocks of network evolution, driving the flexibility, manageability, scalability, and cost effectiveness that organizations require in their balancing act between rapidly growing requirements and much flatter budgets."