Riverbed, Akamai want to accelerate the 'hybrid cloud'

WAN optimizations for cloud is the goal of this joint effort, as even the most intrepid of IT professionals today doesn’t like the idea of moving business apps from secure enterprise environments into the “wilds” of the public Internet. Riverbed and Akamai believe IT organizations can provide users the experience, security and performance of local computing regardless of where applications reside, and thus announced a joint project aimed at creating a seamless experience across private and public clouds.

“The beauty of this effort is we eliminate the need for customers to consider performance implications when choosing whether apps will run over public or private clouds. Business customers can now focus on the functionality of an app, and allow us to worry about the rest,” said Akamai’s Neil Cohen, senior director, product marketing. “The rest” refers to security, performance, availability and scale across hybrid environments—all of which mar the speed with which apps are rolled out and the quality of user experiences.

“We strive to go beyond just moving traffic between private and public clouds. As enterprises move off of private clouds, they shouldn’t have to struggle to get the same service guarantees—a growing problem when you consider the thousands of service providers comprising the public Internet,” said Cohen, reiterating that an Akamai overlay of the public Internet combined with Riverbed’s performance optimization across private networks will help companies extend the reach of their clouds without compromising performance. Because Riverbed’s Steelhead WAN appliances and WAN optimization software will now be integrated into Akamai’s Edge servers and into Akamai’s Internet optimization software and services, the companies contend they can enable customers to work with a variety of cloud applications without heavy capital investments and without compromises to security and performance.

“By blending different data optimization techniques with transport options and application optimization, we can help users and IT organizations realize more efficiency and speed when running networks and applications,” said Apurva Davé, vice president, product marketing, Riverbed.

Whether combining Akamai and Riverbed optimizations will make the Internet a trusted business platform competitive with the likes of cloud offerings available from large telco providers remains to be seen. Success will depend on whether they can really make the Internet look and behave like an enterprise’s private network.