The cloud has made once-clunky and expensive infrastructure a made-to-order service you can pay for online with a credit card in seconds. This has made application development easy enough for middle schoolers. Just one element of infrastructure lags behind in a seeming time warp: Networking. Some professionals say that networking is ripe for a fundamental rethink in order to bring it up to par with the rest of cloud infrastructure.

Paul O’Farrell, SVP and GM of Steelhead and SteelFusion Business Units at Riverbed Technology, Inc., spoke about the current state of infrastructure and development during the Riverbed Disrupt event. “An IT professional can be asked in the morning to spin up servers, storage and an application in multiple countries, and have it done by the afternoon,” he told Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team.

“What you can’t do is spin up your network or manage your network or configure your network with that ease — at least you couldn’t do that before we launched the SteelConnect [a software-defined wide area network) solution product,” O’Farrell said.

Cloud convenience

O’Farrell said that networking has not adopted the cloud-based workload model, and that needs to change.

With SteelConnect, he said, the goal is “a cloud-based management console that you can use to mange every aspect of your network and do that centrally with either one of a very small number of trained professionals,” he said. “You’d really be able to design, deploy and operate your network without ever touching a box.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Riverbed Disrupt.

Photo by SiliconANGLE