When it comes to serious IT, the motto is: “Don’t fix what isn’t broken.” When downtimes cost millions of dollars, that’s a good attitude to have. Experimentation is not a virtue for critical business applications. However, in this world of digital revolution, what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. New rules make the slow and steady pace of traditional IT more of a liability than an asset. Speed and agility have become the watchwords of the modern tech world. IT has to keep up.

To learn more about technology that gives IT the stability they want and the agility they need, Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, visited the Riverbed Disrupt event in New York. There, they spoke to Hansang Bae, CTO of Riverbed Technology, Inc.

Being left behind

The conversation started with Bae discussing the slow and steady mentality among IT workers. He then compared this to other fields where ease of use is job one. Not the case in IT, though, as they’re still using arcane processes and command lines. He was certain this has to change. He felt IT must embrace speed and think like a business unit.

“IT has a choice: Keep up or get out of the way,” Bae said. “Why are we building networks? We have end users consuming and application vendors producing. There’s no reason to have a network other than that.”

He then explained how the user experience is a huge part of this balance. There comes a point where the right guy complains and then everyone jumps on board, he said.

Going dynamic with SD-WAN

“SD-WAN [software-defined wide area network] says, let me simplify the basics of networking,” Bae said. “With it, we now have this living, breathing network where users can impose their will on the router. With SD-WAN, we can create this dynamic network.”

As for running applications seamlessly from anywhere, Bae mentioned a serious problem: the speed of light. Cloud services can’t get applications to users faster than that. SD-WAN, however, cuts through network chatter, tricking the network into delivering applications faster than before. “Applications have to perform, and that’s what we’re about,” he said.

Watch for 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