Businesses have been steadily shifting their applications to the cloud for the better part of a decade, but the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly hastened the move — and caused businesses that were on the fence to fall to the side of cloud as it greatly simplifies working from home.

The subsegment of cloud that has seen the most uptick has been collaboration applications, since they enable workers to continue to work in teams even when socially distant. I’ve referred to this as digital proximity, which is critical in keeping productivity levels as high or higher than they were when people were in the office.

One of the challenges for networking professionals is ensuring the quality of application experience when people are working from home. When workers are in the office and accessing applications that are in the organizations data center, the information technology department can manage the application experience because it owns the end-to-end network path.

When applications shift to the cloud, this creates a problem, since typically IT has no visibility or control of the traffic once it exits the company network and heads out over the internet. That has narrowed the control IT had to the local-area network and, more importantly, the wide-area network because it typically had limited bandwidth.

Now with workers at home, IT seemingly has no control as the entire network journey has moved off the company premises. When a worker calls in and says there’s a problem, what’s a network engineer to do? Toss her hands in the air and say, “Sorry, we have no way of fixing your problem?” Sure, but that does nothing to help the worker. 

To help workers at home, Riverbed Technology Inc. today announced a new solution that helps improve the remote performance of Microsoft collaboration tools. Specifically, SaaS Accelerator 1.2 accelerates Office 365 and Dynamics CRM, and Riverbed’s eCDN improves Microsoft Teams and Stream live events. 

Riverbed is best known as a WAN optimization company that makes connections between data centers and branch offices faster through the use of acceleration. In actuality, Riverbed has been accelerating cloud acceleration for years now. Its first foray into this market is Cloud Accelerator, which makes infrastructure-as-a-service or IaaS traffic faster.

With cloud accelerator, the customer deploys a virtual SteelHead in the IaaS service, which enables acceleration of cloud workloads to whatever endpoint the customer requires including the data center, branch or a client device. Cloud acceleration physically reduces the amount of data going to and from the cloud, making it ideal for cloud migrations and disaster recovery.

SaaS Accelerator has been available for about a year and operates a full managed service, so there’s no heavy lifting by the customer. The service essentially works the same way as Cloud Accelerator, although Riverbed is responsible for the Steelheads in the SaaS vendor. The current version works with basic Office 365 file sharing, Box, ServiceNow, Salesforce and Veeva.

Its latest release, version 1.2, expands the offering to all of the Office 365 products, including SharePoint, Exchange and Office WebApps as well as Microsoft Dynamics. It has also improved the scalability of the offering with support for up to 50,000 concurrent users per application per customer instance. Given that not everyone is logged into these applications 100% of the time, 50,000 concurrent users could support several hundreds of thousands of employees.

The solution also includes a fully managed software based eCDN component for Microsoft Teams and Stream live events and on-demand video. This technically isn’t “acceleration” per se, but it has the same impact because it removes much of the data from the network. There are numerous eCDNs and CDNs available, but Riverbed’s is managed as part of this offering.

During a briefing, the company claimed a 10 times performance improvement of Office 365, which the company had verified by research firm ESG. I’ve talked to dozens of Riverbed customers over the years and unanimously the use of acceleration provides a significant performance boost, so the 10 times number seems almost conservative to me. 

One customer once described WAN optimization as “network crack” where once you deploy it in part of your network, you need more and more because it provides a LAN-like experience over the WAN and now over the internet. Given that the price of SaaS Accelerator is only in the $2.50 to $3 range per month per user, this seems like a very low-cost way of giving all workers, including ones working from home, the best possible user experience.

The shift to work from has raised the bar on the network. In fact, a recent ZK Research Work From Home Study found that 58% of respondents cited that the pandemic has increased the value of the network. That’s why there has been an increase the number of SD-WAN deployments, but SD-WANs don’t solve all problems.

The technology increases resiliency of the network and improves agility but doesn’t make apps run faster.  Acceleration physically reduces the number of packets crossing the wire.

The work-from-home trend is here to stay for the foreseeable future and IT leaders need to start thinking of technology that makes the internet part of the company network. Software-defined WANs can handle connectivity and SASE addresses security, but something like Riverbed’s Accelerators is needed for performance.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

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