Riverbed Technology Inc. is extending a longstanding partnership with Microsoft Corp. with the announcement of Riverbed SteelFusion Azure-Ready Edge, a technology that extends Microsoft Azure cloud storage to network endpoints.

SteelFusion uses Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization engine to give remote locations direct access to the Azure cloud for use as a primary storage tier, allowing data to be provisioned, protected and recovered directly from Azure.

SteelFusion is designed to deliver a cloud-like experience in to information technology organizations that manage complex distributed remote office/branch office locations. It enables remote storage, server, backup and networking infrastructure to be converged into one appliance while providing response times similar to that of local storage.

It does that by using a storage delivery controller that connects to both storage-area network and network-attached storage arrays in the data center or public cloud. Its software-defined structure also enables quick provisioning of new network services, applications and new websites.

While cloud computing has simplified provisioning of new resources, it is also contributed to complexity in environments with a lot of edge devices. Enterprise Strategy Group reports that 91 percent of enterprise IT executives who are responsible for remote or branch offices say the cloud has increased IT management complexity.

Riverbed is one of just a handful of vendors that are applying software-defined principles to wide area networks. It’s building technologies that consolidate WAN, local area network, cloud and data centers on a single fabric.

“You can abstract away some of the complexity of the underlying network and then present that to an admin in a very simple fashion,” Paul O’Farrell, senior vice president and general manager of Riverbed’s Steelhead and SteelFusion business unit, said in a recent interview with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

This latest announcement builds upon the SteelFusion March 2016 release, which added support for Azure through Microsoft StorSimple. The company said more than 1,200 enterprises have chosen SteelFusion as an edge IT platform.

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