Johannesburg, 17 Jun 2014
Using the cloud has multiple business benefits, but it also presents new challenges such as application latency, impairing performance and end-user productivity.
Online subscription-based Microsoft product suite, Office 365, is one of the dominant workloads in enterprise, but users are experiencing sluggish performance. A 10MB PowerPoint presentation on Office 365 can take two seconds to open locally, and from the cloud, 120 seconds - 60 times slower: a figure that can increase when accessing applications via backhaul links.
Announcements were made at Microsoft TechEd in Houston last month around some of the enhancements that Riverbed has made to optimise the Office 365 experience, SharePoint and Azure across private WAN and public Internet, and can accelerate data and application protocols by up to 30 times. This is exciting news for organisations that want to leverage Microsoft cloud solutions while maintaining the highest standards of user experience and contain WAN costs.
Anton Jooste, Executive for Network as the Platform, Dimension Data Middle East and Africa, added: "Riverbed products optimise data for location independent computing, and can be dynamically changed to suit the evolving business landscape. Organisations want to take advantage of the benefits offered by Microsoft cloud software solutions while making sure that application response times leave user productivity unaffected." Riverbed's SaaS solution reduces latency and bandwidth consumption by up to 97% in the Office 365 environment, while increasing application performance and speed. There are huge cost savings to be made, as well as time savings.
Many try to solve application performance problems by adding more data centres and more bandwidth - but by implementing an application performance infrastructure, performance problems are solved easily and cost-effectively. Additional benefits include:
* Up to 30x better application performance for cloud services/SaaS applications, such as Office 365 and Salesforce.com;
* Optimisation across private, hybrid, or public clouds;
* Simple deployment, no rip-and-replace of existing SteelHead appliance deployment, and no configuration changes; and
* Dynamic scaling: SteelHead SaaS is a subscription-based licence add-on, enabling simple appliance deployments.
Dimension Data has enjoyed a long-term relationship with Riverbed and has won numerous awards, most recently: Global Platforms Partner of the Year 2013 and EMEA RASP Partner of the Year 2013. Jooste added: "Our network team is highly experienced with Riverbed's technology, and proud to be one of the partners to deliver an application performance solution to customers, a first within the cloud space and one which is expected to change the pace and the way we work within the cloud."
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