Insight by ThunderCat Technology and Riverbed

Solve the network telework crunch and help your teams collaborate

Pandemic has touched off continuity of operations mode in nearly every federal agency. That, in turn, has produced a rapid expansion in telework and, in some ca...

Pandemic has touched off continuity of operations mode in nearly every federal agency. That, in turn, has produced a rapid expansion in telework and, in some cases, exponential increases in virtual private network traffic.

But neither bandwidth nor money is unlimited for federal agencies. That’s why they must consider technologies to make existing capacity more efficient. Two of the most effective are QoS and WanOptimization. These not only give more effective bandwidth but also potentially reduce the costs imposed by cloud service providers when customers extract data.

These technologies can also reduce some of the performance problems of overtaxed VPNs or sub-optimal home networks, like lost packets, jitter, and frustrating latency that can make users crazy.

In this webinar, we discuss these issues with Peter Marshall, the solutions architect at ThunderCat Technology, and Robert Schumann, the deputy chief technical officer at Riverbed. They describe how solutions such as Riverbed’s Client Accelerator, the industries only WanOptimization Client that leverages the same technology from their Steelhead Product Line, can give you an instance capacity boost for your VPNs. This light weight client on user devices and a simple-to-administer appliance at the server or data center end.

This setup works in a variety of scenarios both onsite and work from home, including client to data center, client to cloud hosted data and files, and client to software-as-a-service products such as Office 365. And it works with almost any network connectivity setup. Moreover, it includes capabilities that ensure agencies can maintain their cybersecurity postures when the majority of users work remotely.

In short, Riverbed byte-level deduplication and other optimization technologies not only expand your effective bandwidth, but help agencies fulfill the real goal of keeping their teams together even when people are far apart.

Shape

Teleworking Lessons

The explosion in telework has forced demands on the wide area networks and a lot of distributed systems that hadn’t been planned for. Typically in a federal agency you have maybe 10, 20, maybe 30 percent of the workforce being remote. Now you’re seeing almost 100 percent.

Shape

Federal and Commercial Teleworking Scenarios with the Cloud

The first step is, identify what is actually on the network, what are those specific applications, what are the workloads, what’s associated with mission critical [work]…and then control that traffic. Then apply different technologies around optimization. Focus on what you can control, and don’t try to boil the ocean.

Shape

Deployment Strategies

What Riverbed’s business is based on is removing redundant data from networks and applications. Let’s say you want to take a document down of 10 megabytes and make a small change to it. When you push that document back up, we’re only going to send those changes. Multiply that across 90,000 users, that’s a tremendous amount of data that can be removed, freeing up those VPNs.

Listen to the full show:

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