Cloud providers like Amazon Web Services Inc. have redefined application deployment for many businesses. In a matter of hours, developers can spin up applications that might have taken days or weeks in the past. If cloud can do this for apps, what can it do for networking? Riverbed Technology Inc.’s answer is its software-defined wide area networking with cloud capabilities.

“We’re at a point now where a lot of the simplicity, the policy-based approach that you see in other parts of cloud infrastructure can now be applied to networking,” said Paul O’Farrell (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of Riverbed’s Steelhead and SteelFusion business unit.

O’Farrell spoke about the sometimes sluggish evolution of the network over the years during an interview with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. The interview took place at theCUBE’s Palo Alto, California, studio. After lagging behind innovation in the application layer for some time, the network is now ripe for a refresh thanks to SD-WAN and cloud, O’Farrell stated. (* Disclosure below.)

Software-Defined Networking began gaining steam a couple of years ago, O’Farrell explained. Due to increased traffic, many companies desired a way to manage the network at the software layer with policy-based, simple configurations. With increased numbers of packets whizzing around, going down and managing the network at the level of IP addresses and port numbers became impractical. SDN provided a means to manage the network centrally; it also freed admins from the drudgery of maintaining network boxes.

Riverbed is “taking some of the concepts of software-defined networking that had been trapped in the data center and then bringing those out onto the Wide Area Network,” O’Farrell said.

Riverbed’s latest technologies extend even beyond SD-WAN; it is bringing a number of network types under central management on a single connectivity fabric. “The whole concept of the WAN feels a little dated right now,” he said. Within enterprises, users are accessing the network more and more via Wi-Fi wireless networks, for instance.

“There’s a blurring of the line between the internet, between the private enterprise network traditionally referred to as the WAN and the LAN,” O’Farrell said. Riverbed is building technologies that span WAN, local area network, cloud and data centers on a single fabric.

SD-WAN becomes ‘cloud networking’

In April Riverbed acquired Wi-Fi provider Xirrus Inc. The acquisition brings WiFi under its network umbrella and imparts cloud management capabilities to Riverbed’s existing portfolio. With cloud management, SD-WAN will probably become known simply as “cloud networking,” according to O’Farrell.

Cloud networking will make life simpler for admins by saving them time to reallocate to higher value-add activities, O’Farrell said. “You can abstract away some of the complexity of the underlying network and then present that to an admin in a very simple fashion,” he said. Much of this comes courtesy of automation. Down the road, machine learning technology will improve cloud networking further, he said.

Today, Riverbed’s technology enables “application-aware networks,” said O’Farrell. To these intelligent networks, a packet is not a packet is not a packet. Instead, it actually “knows what application it’s using, and is applying policies in an automatic fashion,” he said. These policies may involve choosing the optimal path for traffic or whether to apply security policies based on who users are and what they’re attempting to do. This capability is built into Riverbed’s latest SteelConnect SD-WAN for cloud connectivity, he said.

IoT, retail use cases

SD-WAN with cloud connectivity may hold potential for Internet of Things-connected devices and its everlasting network pains. “Instead of having tens, hundreds of clients on a wireless network, for example, you could have hundreds or thousands in a facility,” O’Farrell said. This is likely too much to handle without automation of network functions, he added.

SD-WAN use cases are also cropping up at retailers. “They are using in-store Wi-Fi. They are looking to pull up more bandwidth into the stores to give customers in the store incredibly compelling online experience while they’re shopping,” he said.

The beauty is that it gives smaller brick-and-mortar stores tech capital to compete with e-commerce giants, O’Farrell concluded.

To watch the complete video interview, visit the event page (registration required). (* Disclosure: Riverbed Technology Inc. sponsored this segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Riverbed Technology nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE