Riverbed Optimizes Encrypted Traffic, Improves Visibility

Riverbed today rolled out a stream of new features to its WAN optimization and network performance monitoring platforms that promise to improve visibility and performance for applications using SSL and TLS encryption.

“While encrypted applications protect a company’s data, they previously reduced visibility, and blocked inspection, and significantly complicated acceleration,” Vincent Berk, CTO and chief security architect at Riverbed, said in a statement.

Today’s updates directly address this challenge by not only providing greater visibility, but also improving security and boosting network performance. This is possible thanks to Riverbed’s new Certificate Insights functionality, which highlights which SSL/TLS certificate is being used, by whom, or how close they are to expiring; and the Handshake Insights function, which can show which SSL/TLS versions and ciphers are being used, allowing users to track session renegotiations and errors.

“Complete visibility enables comprehensive analysis, resulting in rapid and accurate identification of root causes, detection of network anomalies, and optimization of traffic movement,” Mark Leary, research director for network analytics at IDC, explained in a statement. “As organizations continue to drive more traffic over the internet and across cloud services, the ability to fully view and accelerate encrypted traffic is critical, and assures there are no trade offs between security and performance.”

Updates to the company’s SteelHead and Client Accelerator platforms also now allow for zero-touch traffic enhancement for applications. This means that customers don’t need to manually collect, create, or distribute encryption certificates or keys to take advantage of these performance gains.

Customers just need to select the applications they want to accelerate and their software platform does the rest, regardless of whether the traffic is encrypted or not, according to Riverbed.

The company claims the updates, which are available now for existing SteelHead and Client Accelerator customers, can deliver as much as a tenfold performance uplift for TLS encrypted traffic while offering customers more granular visibility into the apps and services being used.