Regulations affect businesses across all industries. For example, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) places tough expectations on systems–including a need for 99.9% availability–while healthcare organizations need to be mindful of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and its data-related rules. Then, there are the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS), developed by major credit card companies to help protect cardholders and their information.

But with regulatory needs soaring, technology advancing, and people becoming ever-dependent on their digital worlds, staying compliant can prove incredibly challenging. Here are three of today’s biggest compliance obstacles, and how Riverbed SteelHead can support businesses of all types, sizes, and locations in overcoming them. 

Too much data 

As technology becomes more advanced and people depend on it more, there’s a significant increase in distributed data creation and interconnected devices and nodes from many applications and locations. This means businesses must obtain greater value from all their data sources.

However, untangling this web of complex and disparate data and getting it to the right place and people quickly enough to meet compliance needs, without impacting normal workflow and business operations, can seem impossible. Especially when some regulations may dictate a strict:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum amount of data– as measured by time–that can be lost after disaster, failure, or a comparable event.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable time that an app, device, network, or system can be down after an unexpected incident like those listed above.
• Replication and backup time: How often, and how quickly, systems copy and store data.

Too much latency and congestion 

Things become even more troublesome with the introduction of network limitations, and as data, distance, location, and latency increase. Organizations often boost bandwidth to try and combat these issues at a high financial cost, but fruitlessly; after all, it’s a myth that more bandwidth guarantees higher throughput. In truth, latency hampers maximum throughput, so adding more bandwidth is less relevant. 

One of the most common ways to optimize the speed of a connection is to increase the speed of the link. Still, links can become overloaded if a device tries to send out too much data; this is called congestion. 

Too many tools 

Despite their best efforts, companies are faced with unpredictable, slow, and costly solutions, with shared data becoming stale in transit and arriving later than it’s needed. Some introduce SD-WAN to try and combat the above issues. 

This technology can increase efficiencies by boosting application performance and resiliency; improving network security; and simplifying the WAN architecture. However, its capabilities aren’t always enough. And neither are those of the other industry-standard replication tools or virtual platforms organizations rely on. 

All of this affects productivity and profits, especially when reputation is at stake and eye-watering fines must be paid–which will only add up until organizations fix the root cause of their compliance issues.

How Riverbed SteelHead can help 

Riverbed SteelHead is the number one hybrid network optimization and application performance solution, and a patented solution that is part of our Acceleration offering. 

SteelHead enables companies to efficiently distribute data–exceptionally fast and to scale–across multiple clouds and distributed hybrid networks. It’s scalable and flexible, and has been specifically designed to help organizations overcome network speed bumps like latency, congestion, and sub-optimal last-mile conditions. All securely, with market-leading encryption for your complete peace of mind. 

Riverbed SteelHead can assist you on your compliance journey by empowering you to: 

• Achieve efficient RTO and RPO, and up to 33x faster application performance. Whether you’re mirroring databases or backing up desktops, servers, hot standby sites, or repositories.
• Overcome congestion and consistently utilize up to 90% of available bandwidth by modifying the TCP transmission over the WAN with a layered, compound approach that employs HS-TCP or MX-TCP.
• See 60-90% data reduction and cut the amount of bandwidth you need using scalable data referencing (SDR) and a sophisticated deduplication algorithm built to detect repeatable byte patterns in every payload.

What’s more, the solution works better together with SD-WAN–minimizing turns through local connection proxy and look-ahead capabilities; limiting the number of ‘chatty’ connections and conversations that take place over the WAN; and reducing the effect of latency, greatly improving transfer times in the process. 

Plus, it works well with industry-standard replication tools–from AWS and Azure Cloud to IBM, Dell/EMC VMAX, and NetApp SnapMirror–and virtual platforms like Hyper-V, KVM, and VMware.

To learn more about these topics, read our new whitepaper, How Riverbed’s Data Replication and Disaster Recovery can Assist with Compliance Goals. To learn more about how Riverbed SteelHead can play a part in your path to compliance, get in touch with our helpful team.