The networking world of information technology has, in many ways, remained untouched by the sea of change moving through the tech industry. However, companies and governments are now moving to the cloud, where their legacy networks just aren’t enough. This creates an opportunity for certain tech businesses to offer new networking tools based around modern technology. Riverbed Technology Inc. is one such business.

McFate spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. Together, they discussed Riverbed Technology products, networking, DevOps and the edge. (* Disclosure below.)

New tools for new networks

One of Riverbed’s products, SteelConnect, addresses the idea that businesses have done networking the same way for decades. Meanwhile, everything in the industry has changed. SteelConnect brings that same degree of change to networking. These days, companies demand a network orchestrated through a central control that does what they tell it to do. Riverbed can give that to them, according to McFate.

Beyond business, the government and public sector as a whole has also been moving to the cloud. One very large use case for these organizations is provisioning resources for their applications. SD-WAN — a specific application of software-defined networking technology applied to WAN connections — addresses this use case without having to rip up the network they already run. Instead, it layers flexibility on top of the existing network, McFate explained.

As for developers, DevOps is usually one of the first movers to the cloud within the public sector. They can use tools like SteelConnect and other Riverbed products with a common API to spin up and down whole environments. “It fits very nicely into that DevOps world,” McFate said.

Networking in the modern world also means dealing with the edge, where Internet of Things devices live. The truth is, it all comes down to connectivity, McFate stated. Organizations expect their data to be accessible at all times. SD-WAN addresses this with a suite of policy options for Internet of Things devices that can be set from the top level on down, he added.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: Riverbed Technology Inc. sponsored this AWS Public Sector Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Riverbed Technology nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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