WAN optimisation specialist Riverbed Technology has entered into a partnership security firm McAfee to deliver security and wide area network (WAN) optimisation in a single appliance for organisations with remote offices.
The companies said that the combined offering, which will include a virtual instance of McAfee firewall enterprise software running on the Riverbed Steelhead appliance, will enable enterprises to deliver accelerated data and application access to users while protecting critical information and infrastructure from security threats.
According to Riverbed, its WAN optimisation offerings enable organisations of all sizes to overcome a range of IT and private cloud infrastructure performance bottlenecks, including poor application performance, slow database backups and insufficient bandwidth at remote sites. The Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) is a virtualised data services platform integrated with the Steelhead appliance hardware that allows customers to deploy multiple edge services that formerly required dedicated servers.
Under the partnership, customers can deploy virtualised applications, such as McAfee firewall enterprise software, directly on the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP) to further minimise the hardware infrastructure footprint at the branch office.
McAfee firewall enterprise software offers threat protection such as VPN for secure site-to-site connectivity, anti-spam, URL and web content filtering, encrypted traffic inspection, configurable application-level protection, and reputation-based global threat intelligence to block attacks before they occur.
Venugopal Pai, vice president of alliances at Riverbed, said: “Riverbed’s customers are consolidating their IT infrastructure and moving data farther from users, which has negatively impacted the response times of business-critical applications. Our WAN optimisation solutions help enterprises overcome these issues and deliver LAN-like application performance to distributed employees.”
