Riverbed’s integrated end-to-end visibility solutions offer a powerful platform to gain unparalleled visibility into application, network, and end-user experiences. By providing real-time insights and actionable intelligence, Riverbed empowers businesses to proactively identify and resolve performance issues, optimize resource utilization, and ultimately, achieve their business goals.

Why Riverbed’s visibility solutions stand out

• Keep Users Happy: By providing real-time insights into user experience, Riverbed helps organizations identify and address performance issues before users even notice them, ensuring a smooth and satisfying experience.
• Boost IT Efficiency: Riverbed’s solutions streamline IT operations by automating incident detection and resolution, reducing mean time to repair (MTTR), and optimizing resource utilization.
• Cut Costs: By identifying performance bottlenecks and optimizing resource allocation, Riverbed helps you lower IT expenses while getting the most out of your infrastructure investments.
• Reduce Business Risk: Riverbed’s proactive approach to performance management means fewer service outages and less impact from potential disruptions, keeping your business running smoothly.
• Make Smarter Decisions: The advanced analytics offered by Riverbed provide you with data-driven insights, helping you make informed decisions that drive continuous improvement.

Why choose Riverbed?

Riverbed offers a clear advantage for organizations looking to elevate their digital performance:

• Comprehensive Visibility: Gain unmatched insight across your entire IT environment, from user devices to applications and networks. This comprehensive view enables organizations to identify and address performance issues at their root cause.
• Advanced Analytics: Use AI-powered analytics for proactive infrastructure optimization based on performance trends.
• Seamless Integration: Enjoy hassle-free integration with your existing IT systems, minimizing disruption and maximizing ROI.
• Scalability: Riverbed’s solutions can scale to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises.
• Exceptional Support: Benefit from Riverbed’s strong customer support and professional services to ensure you maximize the value of your investment.

How our solutions work

Riverbed’s visibility solutions collect data from multiple sources—user devices, networks, applications, and cloud infrastructure. This data is then processed and analyzed using advanced analytics and AI techniques to identify performance trends and anomalies. The platform alerts your IT team in real-time, providing visualizations that help them quickly identify and fix issues.

Key components of these solutions include:

• End-user experience monitoring: Understand how your users are interacting with applications and quickly address any performance hiccups.
• Network performance monitoring: Keep your network healthy by identifying and resolving bottlenecks.
• Application performance monitoring: Track how well your applications are performing and tackle any issues impacting user experience.
• Infrastructure monitoring: Keep an eye on your servers, storage, and other critical IT components to ensure they’re performing optimally.
• Cloud monitoring: Gain visibility into your cloud-based applications and services, ensuring they’re delivering as expected.
• AI-powered analytics: Get actionable insights that help you identify performance trends and address issues before they become problems.

Real-world successes

Riverbed’s solutions have been successfully deployed across a wide range of industries, including finance, healthcare, retail, and government. Here are a few examples of how organizations in these sectors are partnering with us to improve their digital performance:

• Financial services: A global bank used Riverbed to identify and resolve performance issues impacting online trading platforms, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and higher revenue.
• Healthcare: A large healthcare provider improved the performance of electronic health records (EHR) systems, improving both clinician productivity and patient care.
• Retail: A major retailer optimized the performance of its e-commerce platform, resulting in increased sales and improved customer satisfaction.

Learn more

Riverbed’s end-to-end visibility solutions offer more than just a way to monitor digital performance—they provide the tools you need to optimize it. With clear visibility, smart analytics, and seamless integration, Riverbed empowers organizations to deliver exceptional user experiences, streamline IT operations, and reduce costs. If you’re serious about improving your digital infrastructure, Riverbed is the ideal partner.

Want to learn more? Let’s connect.

The new Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Digital Employee Experience Tools (DEX) has been published and Riverbed is honored to be recognized as a Leader in the report.

Digital employee experience is crucial today and we believe this placement reflects our vision to transform employee experiences, while optimizing performance, increasing productivity, and maximizing investments in critical business applications and employee devices. 

Delivering exceptional digital experience is not about keeping up—it is about staying ahead. Gartner has recognized Riverbed based on its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

Embracing the future of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) 

In today’s digital-first world, the importance of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) cannot be overstated. Organizations rely on technology to drive business outcomes, like AI (Artificial Intelligence), cloud solutions, and unified observability, to ensure a seamless, efficient, and positive digital experiences for employees. Our Riverbed Global DEX Survey shows 92% of IT leaders say unified observability is important for competitiveness and delivering a seamless DEX. 

Digital Employee Experience refers to the sum of all interactions an employee has with digital tools, applications, and platforms they use in their work environments as well as how they feel about their IT service. This includes everything from the responsiveness of their devices to the ease of accessing critical software applications, to overall performance and reliability of the IT infrastructure, as well as measuring employee sentiment through surveys.

According to our Global DEX Survey, business and IT leaders say investing in DEX is among their top priorities for the next five years, meaning DEX is no longer a luxury but a necessity. 

DEX is critical for the modern enterprise 

Productivity: Employees depend on digital tools to perform their jobs. This is especially true for frontline workers, who rely on these tools and mobile devices to engage with customers. Slow or unreliable technology can disrupt workflows, leading to delays. By investing in DEX, organizations can ensure that all employees have the tools they need to perform their best. 

Employee Satisfaction: A seamless and efficient digital experience contributes significantly to employee satisfaction. When employees can effortlessly navigate their digital environments, they are more likely to feel valued and supported by their organization. 

Attracting and Retaining Talent: In a competitive job market, offering superior experience can be a differentiator in attracting and retaining top talent. Modern employees expect their work environment to be technologically advanced and user-friendly.

Cost Efficiency: Addressing DEX issues proactivity can prevent larger IT problems, reducing downtime and support costs. A well-managed digital environment minimizes the need for extensive training and reduces the likelihood of errors. 

Business Continuity: In an increasingly remote and hybrid work world maintaining a high-quality DEX ensures business continuity. Employees must be able to access critical systems and applications from any location, at any time, without disruption. 

The role of Riverbed Aternity in enhancing DEX 

At Riverbed, our AI-automation driven platform places the end user at the center to optimize digital experience. Riverbed Aternity is the DEX component of the Riverbed platform, empowering organizations to resolve digital experiences swiftly & optimize costs by applying advanced ML & AI to the broadest range of telemetry across all IT domains. 

Aternity provides detailed insights into the performance of applications and devices, including mobile Android and iOS devices, from the end users’ perspective. This end-to-end visibility enables IT to identify and resolve performance issues before they impact employees, ensuring a seamless digital experience. We also measure the actual experience of every employee, and how they feel about their IT service with the actual application and device.

With Aternity, IT teams can proactivity detect and address potential problems before they escalate into major disruptions, ensuring employees can work without interruption and our AI-data driven analytics provide IT and business leaders with the data needed to make informed decisions about technology investments, resource allocation, and process improvements. Because Aternity measures the actual sentiment of employees, organizations can make strategic decisions to enhance DEX by understanding the impact of their digital tools on employee performance.

Aternity understands that investing in DEX is not just about enhancing technology, but creating a work environment where employees can thrive, innovate, and contribute to the organization’s success. With solutions like Aternity, organizations can make sure employees have a consistent and reliable digital experience, regardless of their location and ensure the full potential of their workforce

We invite you to download a complimentary copy of the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Employee Experience Tools (DEX) and see why we are evaluated among other DEX vendors.

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

Riverbed’s NetProfiler has long been a trusted solution for network flow analytics, providing organizations with the tools needed to monitor, diagnose, and optimize network performance. The release of NetProfiler 10.27 brings exciting new features and enhancements that continue to expand its capabilities, particularly in the areas of SD-WAN and cloud integration. In this blog, we delve into the key functionalities, highlight the new features, and summarize the benefits of this latest release. 

Key functionalities of NetProfiler 

NetProfiler is a powerful network observability solution designed to provide proactive monitoring, detailed dependency mapping, and broad visibility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Utilizing behavioral analytics, NetProfiler can detect performance issues before they impact users, while its comprehensive mapping of application transactions to underlying infrastructure ensures accurate service delivery and streamlined troubleshooting.

The platform’s flexibility allows deployment across on-premise, virtual, and cloud environments, integrating seamlessly with other Riverbed solutions like AppResponse and SteelHead to offer a unified view of network and application performance. 

Highlights of the new release 

The latest release of NetProfiler (version 10.27) introduces several enhancements and new features that cater to the evolving demands of network operations.

One of the most significant updates is the expanded support for SD-WAN, specifically the addition of VeloCloud by VMware and improvements to Cisco Viptela visibility. These enhancements include on-demand vManage configuration polling, better SD-WAN query response times, and adds support for bidirectional flows as used by VeloCloud. These updates solidify NetProfiler’s leader position in the SD-WAN monitoring space, addressing competitive pressures and providing valuable insights to customers using these technologies. 

Another notable addition is the integration with Microsoft Azure Blob storage, allowing NetProfiler to consume Azure Virtual Network (VNET) flows. This capability is particularly beneficial for government customers and organizations with significant cloud investments, as it extends the platform’s visibility into major cloud storage solutions, complementing NetProfiler’s existing support for Amazon S3 buckets.  The integration with Microsoft Hyper-V Stack further enhances NetProfiler’s cloud capabilities, enabling improved network analysis, management, and security in environments using Hyper-V, such as Azure Stack HCI. 

Advance network performance monitoring with NetProfiler 10.27

The NetProfiler 10.27 release represents a significant step forward in network performance monitoring, with enhancements that address key industry trends such as the growing adoption of SD-WAN, multi-cloud environments, and hybrid infrastructures. By expanding support for leading SD-WAN vendors like VeloCloud and Cisco Viptela, integrating with major cloud storage platforms, and strengthening security features, NetProfiler continues to evolve as a comprehensive solution that meets the complex needs of modern network operations. 

For businesses seeking to enhance their network visibility, speed up problem identification, and mitigate cybersecurity risks, NetProfiler’s latest release offers a compelling set of tools. With its proactive monitoring capabilities, robust integration options, and commitment to security, NetProfiler remains an indispensable asset for IT organizations striving to maintain optimal network performance in an increasingly complex digital landscape. 

The new release is set to further cement Riverbed’s position as a leader in network observability, ensuring that organizations can continue to rely on NetProfiler for comprehensive visibility and proactive network management in the years to come. 

Check out NetProfiler webpage here for more details.

Riverbed’s position in the market 

Riverbed stands out in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant of the GigaOm Radar for Network Observability. This position signifies Riverbed’s advanced development and comprehensive solution suite tailored for complex network environments. GigaOm recognized the company’s ability to dynamically discover network elements, analyze traffic patterns, and troubleshoot issues in real time. These capabilities help make Riverbed an indispensable tool for enterprises seeking end-to-end network visibility and performance optimization.

Key capabilities and features

Riverbed excels in several critical areas that are essential for effective network observability:

1. Dynamic Discovery: Riverbed’s platform can automatically discover network devices and their interconnections, providing a real-time map of the network topology. This capability is crucial for maintaining an up-to-date understanding of the network’s structure and identifying any changes or anomalies promptly.
2. Traffic Analysis: The ability to monitor and analyze network traffic in detail allows organizations to identify bottlenecks, understand usage patterns, and optimize traffic flow. Riverbed’s traffic analysis tools are sophisticated, offering deep insights that are necessary for proactive network management.
3. Troubleshooting and RCA (Root Cause Analysis): Riverbed provides advanced tools for diagnosing network issues and determining their root causes. This feature significantly reduces the mean time to recovery (MTTR) and helps prevent recurrence by addressing the underlying problems.

Analyst perspective

GigaOm praised Riverbed for its comprehensive approach to network observability. The platform’s integration of AI and machine learning capabilities enhances its ability to provide actionable insights, automate routine tasks, and predict potential issues before they impact network performance. This proactive approach not only improves operational efficiency but also aligns network management with business objectives, ensuring that IT investments deliver maximum value.

Key statistics

• Sector Adoption Score: The companion GigaOm Key Criteria Report for Network Observability graded the network observability sector with an overall adoption score of 4.2 out of 5, indicating strong industry recognition and the critical need for these solutions.
• Flexible Licensing: Riverbed offers perpetual and subscription-based licenses, tiered licensing based on volume, and a variety of support options with different levels of SLA which can offer cost savings for businesses with large complex networks

Riverbed’s fit with evaluation criteria

The GigaOm report outlines several key criteria for evaluating network observability solutions, including:

• Functional Capabilities: Riverbed meets and exceeds the fundamental requirements with its robust feature set, including dynamic discovery, traffic analysis, and comprehensive troubleshooting tools.
• Non-Functional Requirements: These encompass business criteria such as scalability, flexibility, ease of use, ecosystem and cost. Riverbed scores highly in these areas, offering solutions that are not only technically sound but also aligned with business goals.

View the full report

Riverbed’s position as a Leader in the network observability market is well-deserved, thanks to its advanced capabilities and strategic focus on comprehensive network visibility and security observability. The GigaOm Radar report highlights Riverbed’s strengths in dynamic discovery, traffic analysis, and troubleshooting, making it an ideal choice for enterprises seeking a robust and scalable observability solution.

As businesses continue to evolve and adapt to new technological landscapes, having a reliable network observability solution like Riverbed’s will be crucial. Its ability to provide actionable insights and support proactive decision-making ensures that enterprises can maintain optimal network performance and achieve their business objectives efficiently.

For more detailed insights, you can access the full GigaOm Radar report here.

Global IT organizations are still recovering, and it could take weeks to fully recover. This incident underscores the critical importance of Observability and Digital Experience Management (DEM) solutions in today’s interconnected world. DEM solutions can provide immense value during global IT outages like the recent CrowdStrike incident.

Key benefits of DEM solutions during global IT outages

During an outage, clear communication with users is crucial. Organizations need to quickly detect and respond to issues to resolve the downtime and disruption. DEM solutions capture user interactions and performance metrics to allow organizations to keep users informed about service statuses and expected resolution times.

By offering insights into system performance and user behavior, DEM solutions help build more resilient IT infrastructures with comprehensive reporting enabling organizations to understand the impact of outages and improve future response strategies, providing valuable data for post-incident analysis and continuous improvement.

Riverbed Aternity: A vital tool for managing global outages

Riverbed Aternity is a prime example of a DEM solution that can be invaluable during global IT outages. The past few days, many customers have been using Aternity to gain visibility of the impact from the CrowdStrike incident, which has enabled organizations to take prescriptive actions to fix problems faster and mitigate this situation.

Aternity swiftly helped customers identify which applications and servers across the enterprise were affected and determined whether the issues were escalating or subsiding. This visibility let

IT teams quickly confirm which systems were back to normal, ensuring a smooth and efficient recovery process. Here are a few ways Aternity can help in these types of incidents:

1. Real-Time Monitoring: Aternity provides real-time monitoring of user experiences and application performance. This can help organizations quickly identify and diagnose issues affecting their systems and devices.
2. Incident Management: With its detailed analytics and insights, Aternity can assist IT teams in pinpointing the root causes of outages and performance degradation, enabling faster resolution.
3. User Experience Insights: By understanding how the outage impacts end-users, organizations can prioritize critical issues and ensure that essential services are restored first.
4. Proactive Alerts: Aternity’s proactive alerting system can notify IT teams of potential issues before they escalate, helping to mitigate the impact of the outage.
5. Comprehensive Reporting: Detailed reports and dashboards provide visibility into the performance and availability of applications and services, aiding in post-incident analysis and future prevention strategies.

Aternity ensures consistent performance, availability, and continuous operation, even during large-scale disruptions. These capabilities make Riverbed Aternity a powerful ally in managing and mitigating the effects of a widespread IT outage.

Aternity’s ability to track and monitor critical errors

By tracking and monitoring instances of the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) on Windows devices, Aternity helps IT teams identify and troubleshoot the root causes of these critical system errors, ensuring better stability and performance for end-users.

Aternity tracks BSOD events by monitoring the health and performance of Windows devices in real-time through the following process:

• Agent Installation: A small agent is installed on each monitored device, collecting data on system performance, application usage, and errors, including BSOD events.
• Event Logging: When a BSOD occurs, the agent logs the event details, such as the error code, timestamp, and relevant system information.
• Data Transmission: The collected data is sent to Aternity’s central server, where it is aggregated and analyzed.
• Dashboard and Alerts: IT teams can view BSOD events on Aternity’s dashboard, which provides visualizations and detailed reports. Alerts can also be configured to notify IT staff immediately when a BSOD occurs.
• Root Cause Analysis: Aternity helps identify patterns and potential root causes of BSOD events by correlating them with other system and application performance data.

This comprehensive approach allows IT teams to quickly identify and address the underlying issues causing BSODs, improving overall system stability and user experience.

Assisting with remediation during outages

For those already using Aternity, the impact of software upgrades, such as the CrowdStrike Sensor Platform and CrowdStrike Windows Sensor from version 7.14.18408.0 to 7.14.18410.0, can be closely monitored. IT teams can run remediation scripts to resolve issues, such as:

1. Booting Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment.
2. Navigating to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory.
3. Locating and deleting the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”.
4. Booting the host normally.

In conclusion, the recent CrowdStrike global outage has highlighted the critical importance of Digital Experience Management solutions. Solutions like Riverbed Aternity provide the real-time insights, proactive alerts, and comprehensive reporting needed to manage and mitigate the effects of widespread IT disruptions effectively. As organizations continue to recover, investing in robust DEM solutions will be key to building more resilient IT infrastructures and maintaining service continuity in the face of future challenges.

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.

This blog delves into three pivotal types of performance data: device performance, application performance, and user details, and highlights their significance in the healthcare sector. 

Device performance 

Device performance data encompasses metrics related to the health and functionality of devices used within healthcare facilities. This includes monitoring CPU usage, memory consumption, disk space, and battery life. For healthcare providers, ensuring that medical devices and computer systems operate optimally is crucial. Any lag or failure in these devices can directly impact patient care, leading to delays in diagnosis or treatment. By regularly monitoring device performance, healthcare IT teams can proactively address potential issues, ensuring that all equipment is functioning correctly and efficiently. 

Application performance 

Application performance monitoring involves tracking the behavior and efficiency of software applications used in healthcare settings. This includes response times, error rates, and usage patterns of various applications. EHR systems like EPIC and Cerner, PMS like FANS, and diagnostic tools like PACs and Powerscribes are crucial software for healthcare providers. Ensuring these applications run smoothly is vital for maintaining uninterrupted patient care and operational workflows. Monitoring application performance helps in identifying and resolving bottlenecks, thus enhancing the overall user experience and reducing downtime.   

User details 

The third crucial type of performance data is user details, which provide insights into how healthcare professionals interact with devices and applications. This includes tracking user sessions, usage patterns, and feedback. Understanding user behavior is essential for optimizing the digital experience and identifying training needs. In healthcare, where time and accuracy are paramount, ensuring that staff can efficiently navigate and utilize digital tools is critical. Analyzing user details can highlight areas where systems may need adjustments or where additional training may be required to improve efficiency and satisfaction. 

Monitoring employee sentiment 

An extension of understanding user details is monitoring employee sentiment. Gathering and analyzing feedback from healthcare professionals regarding their digital experience can offer valuable insights. Correlating sentiment data with performance metrics helps in identifying pain points and areas needing improvement. Enhancing employee satisfaction with digital tools not only boosts productivity but also contributes to better patient care.   

Healthcare providers can achieve similar results by capturing and analyzing the objective and subjective metrics of patients and clinicians through device performance, application performance, and user details. This will lead to a more efficient, responsive, and patient-centric healthcare delivery system.

At the conference, stands and speakers explored how today’s companies can:

• Understand their digital workplace maturity level
• Learn how to advance their digital employee experience
• Discover how to leverage GenAI for increased workplace productivity
• Tackle topics like hybrid working, collaboration tools, and more

As leaders in AI observability, a technology that supports each of these areas, we were well-positioned to advise and empower attendees. Here are three key takeaways from the event and our conversations there.

AI is top of mind at C-level

AI and its adoption are critical components of a CIO’s role–so the implementation and use of these technologies are a discussion for the boardroom. This point was highlighted at the summit.

Gartner shared research from its 2022 Digital Worker Survey, in which 49% of respondents named the CIO as one of the top three executives whose policies and actions have had the most positive influence on their employee experience. This aligned with our own findings that 75% of CIOs are testing or implementing AI projects, and that AI projects top budget spending over the next three years. However, the challenge is implementing AI that works.

Gartner highlighted the importance of breaking down siloed experiences, reducing fragmentation and risk, and prioritizing impactful investments. This is exactly what we do at Riverbed: we use powerful AI and machine-learning technology to achieve these goals automatically, with minimal need for human intervention. We pride ourselves on our library of 170 pre-built, expert-designed, triggered remediations.

The total experience matters most

While the experience you give your customers is paramount, employees need an exceptional one too. However, delivering better user experiences is getting harder with increasing IT complexity, end-user demands, and hybrid work.

Our scalable solutions collect, analyze, automate, and report on real data through a Unified Agent with a single, simple user interface. This means we can deliver actionable insights on user experience at every device, application, and click; immediately diagnose user experience issues, remotely and non-invasively; and pinpoint opportunities to improve the digital experience. What’s more, we tackle the problem of agent fatigue by collecting more data without adding agents via our unified agent manager.

We also offer superior out-of-box experiences for popular business process applications and open support for 35 third-party integrations–including AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Workspace, ServiceNow, and Slack–so every employee’s every experience is monitored and optimized.

Frontline workers need our focus

Gartner’s 2022 Digital Worker Survey found that most employees still only view IT as a support function, with 55% approaching IT for technical support. Yet, IT can’t prevent and resolve critical issues fast enough, with a flood of false-positive alerts, a shortfall of top IT talent, and a lack of tools and precise insights into which notifications matter.

This is especially challenging for frontline workers, whose jobs are essential and whose digital experience can be life-changing – and life-saving. The good news is that we can remedy their issues in the ways we’ve mentioned above, giving them fewer blue-screen moments and more seamless processes that boost their productivity and drive better outcomes. We can also support them across mobile and tablet devices, which they tend to use in their fast-paced, often-physical roles.

With 155 million new company-owned devices entering the market every year, unsurprisingly, this creates gaps in measuring device performance. Enter our mobile device data-collection solution, Aternity Mobile, which gathers over 150 metrics on mobile device, app and network performance. This allows IT to proactively identify digital experience issues on company-provided mobile devices and take action. It works on Apple iOS and Android across the most complete range and broadest coverage of user experience devices: computer, web, mobile, and free-standing kiosks.

At Riverbed, we support businesses in building more digitally mature workplaces using a unique combination of employee experience expertise and state-of-the-art, AI-powered tools. We hope to see you at an event soon, but in the meantime, get in touch with our friendly, helpful team to find out more about what we do and how we can help.

On May 7, Riverbed unveiled NPM+, a new cloud observability service designed for both edge and cloud network observability, and enhancements to Riverbed IQ, our AIOps-driven automation solution. The EMA Impact Brief 2024 highlights the need for such solutions and discusses advancements in AI-driven automation and network observability solutions that address these challenges.

Here are the highlights of the brief: 

NPM+: Next-gen network observability 

Riverbed NPM+ is a SaaS-delivered observability solution designed to offer granular visibility into network performance from any client or server endpoint. Leveraging the new Riverbed Unified Agent, NPM+ passively monitors IP and TCP connections before and after data gets encrypted, providing IT managers with detailed insights into all network traffic. This includes monitoring remote users, cloud traffic, and traffic within zero trust network access service edges.

Key features include: 

• Comprehensive Visibility: NPM+ illuminates critical blind spots in network performance, particularly for remote users and cloud-based services. 
• Granular Monitoring: IT managers can monitor performance by user, system name, application process, and more. 
• Reduced Administrative Overhead: By utilizing the Riverbed Unified Agent, NPM+ offers a streamlined approach to network performance monitoring, eliminating the need for additional agents and reducing complexity. Unified agent is an innovative common agent strategy to streamline deployment, management, and updates of Riverbed’s agent-based offering. The only agent management solution to support endpoint monitoring for both end user experience and network observability. 

Riverbed IQ: AI-driven automation 

Riverbed IQ, an AIOps solution introduced in 2022, has been enhanced with a new runbook editor for no-code/low-code automation. This tool analyzes telemetry from Riverbed’s observability solutions and third-party tools, detects anomalies, correlates events, and conducts root-cause analysis. The runbook editor allows IT operations teams to automate actions based on AI-derived insights through a drag-and-drop interface. Key components include: 

• Triggers, Actions, and Outputs: The interface is centered on these concepts, enabling IT professionals to build workflows that respond to AI insights. 
• Prebuilt Integrations: Riverbed IQ includes numerous integrations with third-party systems, extending its capabilities across various platforms and tools. 
• Proactive Issue Resolution: The automation capabilities of Riverbed IQ enable prompt response to incidents, minimizing downtime and enhancing operational efficiency. 

Addressing modern IT challenges

Riverbed’s updates cater to the needs of modern IT operations teams. According to Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), 87% of IT organizations are allocating budgets to improve network experience monitoring for remote workers. Traditional tools like remote desktop access and endpoint monitoring fail to provide comprehensive network visibility. Riverbed’s NPM+ and Aternity endpoint monitoring solutions, leveraging the new Unified Agent, offer a streamlined approach with less administrative overhead. 

Moreover, 57% of network teams expressed a desire for AIOps solutions with low-code interfaces to build runbook automation. Riverbed IQ directly addresses this need, supporting intelligent alerting, escalations, and self-healing networks, making it a valuable asset for IT operations seeking efficiency and reliability. 

Learn more 

Riverbed’s introduction of NPM+ and enhancements to Riverbed IQ represent significant strides in network observability. These tools address critical blind spots, enhance AI-driven automation, and provide comprehensive visibility and control over modern, dynamic network environments. By integrating these advanced solutions, organizations can ensure efficient and reliable network performance, improve security, and drive operational efficiency. As networks continue to evolve, Riverbed’s cutting-edge solutions and innovative approach establish us as a leader in delivering seamless digital experiences and robust network observability.

The future of network management lies in comprehensive, intelligent observability, and Riverbed is at the forefront of this transformation. Download the EMA impact brief here for more information. 

Across financial services, technology like machine learning is already being applied from the back office to the front, as it is used to replace human judgement in underwriting, assess risk in the payments industry, provide customers with conversational interfaces in mobile banking apps, and more.

The question is, how can banks keep up, get ahead, and capitalize on these exciting new advancements? Here are our top tips.

Meet your peers

Today, chains like Ethereum, Polygon and Solana have over 1.3 billion addresses–the equivalent of a bank account–and there are thousands of developers working on an open-source way to extend financial software, right now as you read this.

Essentially, FinTechs and neobanks have taken on the biggest names in the business, the likes of Visa and MasterCard, and they’re winning. An estimated $4 billion in capital is going into the FinTech sector a month and the decentralization of the finance industry is happening in front of our eyes. So, even the most established banks shouldn’t become complacent, and must embrace the opportunity to adapt.

Partner up

However, this seismic change can’t be tackled alone. Transformation begins with collaboration, and banks must find the right technology partners if they want to stay competitive.

Relationships work both ways, too, as tech giants lean on financial firms to offer their customers integrated banking solutions. For example, Apple Card was created in partnership with Goldman Sachs, or Amazon connecting pools of capital to underwrite the commerce that takes place on it.

Explore new platforms

In addition to the right partner, you need the right platform; one that’ll empower you to improve your visibility and understanding of what banking with you looks like for your customer. This is because digital experience is everything.

In Riverbed’s Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) survey, 98% of FSI-leader respondents agreed DEX is important to remain competitive.

Keep your customers ‘appy’

So, let’s look at the user’s perspective for a moment. To them, this industry advancement is fantastic. They no longer need to distinguish payments, banking, and investing; as they are all integrated, usually in one easy-to-use, quick-to-navigate app or website.

They can send money to friends and family through social media messaging apps. They can save through payment apps. They can invest in treasuries through savings apps. They can oversee all their accounts, budgets, incomings, outgoings and more through financial management apps. Remember, if they can’t do all this on your app–preferably facilitated by a friendly robo-advisor–they’ll switch to a competitor, where they can.

Delve into your data

What lies at the heart of creating actionable insights and delivering these relevant digital experiences? Data.

It’s never been more vital to collect, analyze and extract actionable insight from full-fidelity data across all your platforms. To have great AI outcomes, you need great data.

The key is understanding what ‘normal’ looks like to you, so you can avoid falling below this benchmark and know when you’re achieving above it.

Invest in intelligent monitoring

By partnering with an AI observability leader and implementing their platform to monitor your data (that’s all the previous steps sorted), you can begin to establish that ‘normal’, discover the experiences of your employees and customers, and make improvements – all based on fact, rather than your best guesswork.

Automate, automate, automate

The best platforms in the market will even have integrated tools, powered by AI and machine learning, that automate those improvements. By automatically performing tasks like cutting complexity by creating logical shortcuts; addressing lower-level service desk issues; and fixing bugs; organizations can boost employee productivity and fine-tune apps. So, when new functionality does go live, it makes superior experiences for everyone.

Review your resources and make smart choices

By gaining insight into what resources you have, which you actually use, where you need more and how often they truly need updating or upgrading, you can make smarter choices, working more efficiently, and cost-effectively.

For example, consider:

• Right-sizing hardware – do you really need all those laptops, or would VDI spaces do the trick?
• Software – how many of those licenses actually have users assigned to them?
• Storage – how much data are we honestly using?
• And maintenance – do all our devices need replacing at once or are some still performing well?

These can all have a significant impact on your IT investment.

Monitor trends and patterns today and into the future

With all the data you are monitoring, AI can be used not only to see what’s going on today, but also to model what might happen tomorrow, and how you can stay on top of it.

Let’s say, for example, customers regularly visit your banking app on payday to spend, save and invest their cash. You can predict this pattern, allocating additional bandwidth towards the end of the month so network performance stays smooth.

Protect your budget and our planet

Investing in, and releasing, new tech can be costly. But in turn, these technologies can allow you to save money and cut your carbon footprint. By carrying out all the steps above–using data-driven insight to right-size, increase productivity and predict trends–you can improve ROI while using fewer resources.

Riverbed’s AI-powered observability solutions are transforming the digital financial landscape by providing seamless and secure user experiences across every channel–integrating with other technologies, and incorporating AI and machine learning, to provide proactive remediation, reduce costs and cut carbon impact. Get in touch with our expert team, so we can work together to bring your bank into the future.

Let’s delve into the key advantages and explore how AppResponse  empowers you to solve real-world use cases.

Main advantages of Riverbed AppResponse TCP metrics

Riverbed AppResponse allows for faster data-driven analysis:

• Granular Visibility: Gain unprecedented detail into the behavior of TCP connections. Metrics like retransmissions, round-trip times (RTTs), and window sizes paint a vivid picture of network performance, pinpointing bottlenecks and inefficiencies with laser precision.
• Proactive Problem Solving: Don’t wait for user complaints to identify issues. AppResponse proactively alerts based on TCP metrics to empower you to anticipate and address problems before they impact user experience or business continuity.
• Application-Centric Insights: Correlate TCP metrics with specific applications, allowing you to isolate performance issues affecting individual applications rather than struggling with network-wide troubleshooting.
• Faster Root Cause Analysis: The intuitive interface and insightful visualizations enable you to drill down to the root cause of performance problems quickly and efficiently, saving valuable time and resources.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: Backed by concrete data on TCP behavior, you can make informed decisions about network optimizations, capacity planning, and resource allocation, ensuring optimal application performance and user experience.

Solving business use cases with AppResponse

Business outcomes drive today’s investment decisions. With Riverbed AppResponse, you can:

• Proactively address application performance degradation: Identify and address performance issues before they impact users, preventing lost productivity and revenue. Instead of having to tediously pore over a trace file looking for the TCP window size issue,. Being able to quickly see where and when the breakdown in communications happened means you can speedily troubleshoot the application slowdown, and get your users back to productive work quickly and easily.
• Optimize application performance for remote users: Identify and address network issues impacting geographically dispersed users, ensuring a seamless and productive experience regardless of location.
• Troubleshoot VoIP and video conferencing issues: Gain deep insights into jitter, latency, and packet loss, ensuring smooth and reliable communication for critical collaboration tools.
• Pinpoint bottlenecks in cloud migrations: Monitor TCP metrics to identify performance bottlenecks during cloud migrations, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption.
• Demonstrate ROI for network investments: Quantify the impact of network improvements on application performance with concrete data, justifying investments and demonstrating value to stakeholders.

No more sifting through Terabytes of data manually

By harnessing the power of TCP metrics with Riverbed AppResponse, you gain an invaluable ally in optimizing network performance and ensuring a seamless user experience. This translates to increased productivity, improved business continuity, and a competitive edge in today’s digital landscape. So, take control of your network and empower your business with the power of data-driven insights.

Engaging in meaningful discussions about Riverbed’s role in Africa’s emerging tech landscape with attendees from South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, and other parts of the continent, we identified three key takeaways from this extraordinary event.

1. Satellite connectivity is key

Africa’s technology infrastructure is rapidly developing, yet it has some way to go to match the speed and standards common in the Western world. As operating from cities isn’t always possible, realistic, or necessary, many African companies, particularly those in remote or rural areas, rely heavily on satellite connectivity.

But even large organizations with urban locations depend on the technology. For example, one major bank we spoke to has sites in Rabat, Casablanca, and Marrakech with an MPLS link, and still uses satellite connectivity for their remote branches to transfer data. After all, it’s secure and functional. However, it can be made stronger, faster, more reliable, and more cost-effective by adding Riverbed’s Application Acceleration solutions.

Latency can be high when data is transferred on a satellite connection across distant locations. It can rise even further as the amount of data and connected devices businesses deal with increases. Organizations often boost bandwidth to try and remedy these issues, at high financial cost. Still, it’s a myth that more bandwidth guarantees higher throughput; in reality, latency hampers maximum throughput, making bandwidth irrelevant.

Another way companies try to overcome their latency issues is by installing tools designed for this purpose. These can be unpredictable, slow and costly, leading to data becoming stale in transit and arriving later than it’s needed.

Enter Riverbed’s Application Acceleration portfolio, which empowers companies to quickly and efficiently distribute data across satellite connections. It’s scalable and flexible, and has been specifically made to help firms overcome network speed bumps like latency, congestion, and sub-optimal last-mile conditions. All securely, with market-leading encryption for complete peace of mind.

With Acceleration, businesses can make double-digit improvements in data transfer speed. Unsurprisingly, many GITEX Africa attendees were interested in employing the platform primarily for this purpose.

2. The cloud hasn’t arrived… yet

At global events, cloud technology is often a hot topic, but this was not the case at GITEX Africa, as it hasn’t reached much of the continent yet. However, with rapid technological advancements across Africa, the cloud is expected to arrive soon, and businesses must be ready to seize this opportunity. Riverbed can support companies with local optimization and is prepared to help migrate data and streamline traffic to, from, and within the cloud or any network, on- or off-premises.

Several attendees were keen on future-proofing their operations, recognizing that the cloud is a significant development likely to emerge soon.

3. Remote connectivity must be considered

One topic that did prove a common conversation starter was the use case of data center disaster recovery (DCDR). Organizations in Africa are consistently looking to improve latency and connectivity through their disaster recovery and backup. This is critical when you have data replicating between the data center and the disaster recovery site, with remote workers connecting to data centers through laptops.

At Riverbed, we offer two-step support in this area. First, we address data replication and flow between the company’s sites. Second, we install client accelerators on agents’ laptops, speeding up and securing systems no matter which network they’re connected to.

In conclusion, big things are happening in the African market. Connectivity, the cloud, and remote working were all discussed in initial conversations, and we look forward to talking to visitors more in the coming weeks and months about their goals in these areas.

Consider this: Riverbed polled 40,074 Mac devices and found an average of 31 agents per device. Some of these agents take three minutes or more to boot, and they average just under one crash per month per device.

Does this sound familiar? What if you could cut through the alert fatigue, overcome staffing shortages, and reduce the number of software agents you need to manage?

A single Unified Agent solution

Riverbed Unified Agent is an essential element of the Riverbed Observability and Optimization Platform. It was built from day one to be a single agent solution for deploying and managing Riverbed agent-based modules, as well as select third-party offerings.

Unified Agent provides a combination of selectable services. Today, these services include:

• Aternity EUE for end-user experience monitoring of device and application performance
• Aternity Digital Assistant for polling user sentiment
• NPM+ Core for monitoring TCP network and application performance (beta)

Additional modules will be coming soon.

Simply deploy Unified Agent once, then load the desired modules onto the devices you choose. This results in massive scalability and efficiency with less effort.

Unified Agent makes it easy to deploy, update, and manage agent modules. Deploy it once and get automatic updates of both the agent and modules (or opt to update them manually, it’s your choice).  Easily add or disable agent modules and see the status of all deployment of all modules.

Additional benefits of using a single agent include:

• A single installation process
• A single point of management for enabling module features
• One-time validation of agent security
• Easy addition or disabling of agent modules
• Built-in governance to protect customer assets
• Automatic updates of modules
• Support for third-party modules certified by Riverbed

In short, Unified Agent enhances IT efficiency, reduces costs, and improves user experience.

Selectable modules support full-stack observability

Unified Agent future-proofs your agent strategy by providing immediate access to a library of selectable modules. These modules are controlled through a single SaaS-based management console. They capture full-fidelity data across the spectrum and direct key metrics to either Riverbed Aternity or the new Riverbed NPM+ cloud network observability service.

To learn more about Riverbed Unified Agent, click here.

Gartner projects that businesses will spend $61.5B on mobile devices in 2024, up 1.4% from 2023, according to Gartner Market Data Book 1Q24. Gartner also projects that companies will purchase 155 million mobile devices, including phones and tablets, for their workforce in 2024.

The scary part about Mobile DEX

Digital Employee Experience Management, or DEX, is a hot topic right now. Every observability vendor touts their abilities to gather telemetry on device and application performance and usage, associate that with employee sentiment and organizational context, and then employ AI or ML techniques to proactively identify and resolve employee issues, while providing insights into better performance and changes in behavior.

Here’s the thing: most of these vendors are focused on ensuring excellent DEX for employees who use laptops, PCs, or thin-client devices. They don’t have the ability to ensure a positive Mobile DEX. With 155 million mobile devices in use, that’s a pretty sizeable blind spot. Especially since these mobile users are the point people–they’re the ones interacting directly with customers or patients or citizens. So, if IT lacks visibility into their Mobile DEX, they really have no idea of whether issues are affecting revenue, productivity, satisfaction, or even healthcare outcomes.

Mobile DEX for corporate-owned Android and iOS devices

For front-line workers and other employees who rely on mobile devices for their jobs, poor digital experience negatively affects productivity and customer service. IT is responsible for the digital experience of these employees, just as they are for employees who use laptops and PCs, but they lack visibility to proactively identify and resolve issues affecting the full range of mobile apps and devices used by the workforce.

Solving key challenges in assuring mobile digital experience

Riverbed’s Mobile DEX solution, Aternity Mobile, enables IT teams to proactively identify digital experience issues on Android and iOS mobile apps and devices and take prescriptive, targeted actions, improving employee productivity, customer service and business results. Aternity Mobile provides a comprehensive view of mobile app and device performance across Android and iOS for multiple vendors and enables IT to improve employee experience by engaging with them to get feedback and send contextual help.

Only Aternity, the digital experience solution of the Riverbed Platform for unified observability and optimization, provides a cohesive view of digital employee experience throughout their day, even as they switch between devices. Watch this video to see how it works:

Riverbed fills the Mobile DEX gap

Mobile DEX is a gap that most management solutions don’t address. Enterprise Mobility Management solutions don’t provide enough visibility into actual app and device performance. They can tell which mobile apps have been deployed to mobile devices, but they can’t see their performance. They know the device specifications, but they can’t do detailed device or network monitoring. Agent-based DEX solutions can’t instrument Android or iOS apps, so traditional DEX vendors can’t understand the performance of the majority of mobile devices being used–only Windows devices. And mobile SDKs can only monitor native mobile apps owned by the organization. Vendors of specialized mobile devices, like Zebra, have some mobile DEX capabilities, but only for their mobile devices, not others.

Proactively identify and resolve mobile issues

Aternity Mobile gathers more than 150 metrics on mobile device, app and network performance that enable IT to proactively identify and resolve digital experience issues. Unlike other solutions, Aternity gathers this performance data across Android and iOS for multiple device vendors, including rugged mobile devices and free-standing mobile kiosks.

With Aternity Mobile, IT can identify problems with hardware and battery health, device configuration or network connection and proactively take action to improve employee productivity and customer service.

Detect and resolve individual device issues

With Aternity Mobile, IT can drill down into a specific user’s device to identify and resolve issues affecting productivity. Aternity Mobile enables IT to analyze device health metrics such as storage, RAM, CPU and battery strength and drain rate. It also provides telemetry on signal strength and health of Wi-Fi and cellular networks used by the employee. Analyzing usage patterns of apps and websites enables IT to ensure compliance with corporate usage policies.

Monitor mobile app performance to ensure employee productivity

Aternity Mobile also monitors usage and crashes for every corporate mobile app used by the workforce. Aternity provides detailed information such as the traffic generated by each app, the start and stop time of the app, and the domains the users were accessing with their mobile device, to ensure the mobile device is being used only for company-approved apps. This provides IT with deep insight into how mobile app performance and usage affects productivity and security.

Improve employee engagement with bi-directional communication 

With Aternity Mobile, IT can send contextual and personalized information to employee mobile devices to gather feedback on service quality issues and to provide guidance on ways employees can improve their mobile app and device performance. Aternity Mobile enables IT to proactively inform users of outages, provide information upon app installation/first use, or based on user location, and send warnings when corporate policy usage limits are about to be reached.

Learn more

Now with Mobile DEX, Aternity is the only digital employee experience solution that provides a unified view of actual employee experience, for every enterprise app running on any type of device – laptops, PCs, virtual and mobile–for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS and Chromebook. With Aternity, digital workplace leaders gain insights into the digital experience of their entire workforce, no matter where they work, to ensure employees are productive and engaged.

To learn more about Aternity, please visit: riverbed.com/aternity-mobile

Or better yet, watch the replay of our Global Webcast where we cover this, along with other new capabilities from our recent product launch.

As we all know, ITOps teams face the daunting task of managing vast amounts of data and alerts without sufficient context or actionable insights. Riverbed’s Platform empowers IT professionals by streamlining cross-domain data analysis and correlation to reduce the number of alerts your team must triage and then automates diagnosis and remediation.

The Riverbed Platform

The innovative Riverbed Platform approach combines observability and acceleration modules with enabling technology that supports accurate data collection and analysis, and our integration library of pre-built expert remediations, automations, and application integrations that automate problem identification and resolution. More specifically,

• Platform modules collect high-fidelity data across the entire IT stack, including digital experience, infrastructure, network, cloud, and application observability and application acceleration solutions. Key metrics from across Riverbed Observability modules are ingested into our powerful AI automation service to identify service-impacting events and automate diagnosis and remediation.
• The enabling technology layer supports accurate data collection using our Edge Collector, Riverbed Unified Agent and the Riverbed Data Store, while capabilities like Topology Viewer, AI, Automation and dashboards ensure accurate analysis of this data.​
• The integrations library gives our customers access to out-of-the-box third-part integrations. Pre-built application integrations facilitate easy integration with popular third-party software into automation workflows, including ITSM, business process, business productivity, and security solutions. While low-code graphical workflow processes permit IT to build or customize remediations, automation and integrations to optimize them for their specific IT environment.

With the ability to integrate data sources into a single view, the Riverbed Platform makes it easy to deliver precise answers that keeps IT running. In short, the Riverbed Platform offers the means to not only cope with the evolving digital landscape but to thrive in it, relieving IT of the burden of manually collecting and analyzing data from across IT systems.

Only Riverbed delivers full-stack observability  

Modern IT and cloud environments are highly complex and dynamic, creating a significant need for observability solutions that leverage AI automation. Similarly, organizations are facing more digital experience challenges as they increasingly rely on mobile devices for employees to do their jobs. ​According to Samsung, 61% of organizations provide “corporate owned” mobile devices to a portion of their workforce. ​

Today’s announcement significantly expands Riverbed’s observability capabilities to include monitoring end user experience on mobile devices; support for integrated overlay and underlay visibility for popular SD-WAN solutions; and new cloud monitoring capabilities.

The new observability capabilities include:

• Riverbed Aternity Mobile makes employees more productive and improves business results by enabling IT teams to proactively identify digital experience issues on enterprise-provided mobile devices to enable prescriptive, targeted remediation actions. No other DEM vendor supports these capabilities.

• Riverbed NPM+ is a new cloud observability service that overcomes traditional network blind spots created by remote work, public cloud, and encrypted architectures. Riverbed NPM+ ensures holistic network observability by extending visibility to previously unmonitored network locations. By collecting decrypted data at every user and server endpoint (including Kubernetes environments), NPM+ fills the visibility gaps caused by encrypted tunnels in Zero Trust environments.
• Riverbed Unified Agent is an innovative common agent strategy to streamline deployment, management, and updates of Riverbed’s agent-based offerings. Using selectable modules, it helps IT reduce agent fatigue and agent conflict. The only agent management solution to support endpoint monitoring for both end user experience and network observability, Unified Agent helps realize the value of Riverbed’s AI-ready telemetry, delivering intelligence, observability and a seamless experience anywhere, for anyone.
• Riverbed NetProfiler adds support for VeloCloud SD-WAN and Cisco SD-WAN (formerly Viptela). It integrates overlay and underlay views for clearer troubleshooting of SD-WAN health and performance issues.

New Intelligence 

AI is the next big transformation in IT and a number one priority of IT leadership. The Riverbed Platform is well positioned to help customers build successful AI and automation strategies with easy deployment and implementation. Our AIOps service enables IT teams to apply AI across their observability tools and embed AI-driven automation to increase IT efficiencies, scale to increased workloads, and reduce the time and cost of problem identification and remediation.

The cornerstone of the Riverbed Platform is Riverbed IQ, a SaaS-delivered AI automation. This 2.0 release enhances automation by enabling workflow processes to be scheduled or run on-demand, while custom tags support more detailed prioritization. The new Integration Library lets customers easily incorporate third-party data into their troubleshooting workflows using ready-made sub-flows. Finally, direct integration of Riverbed AppResponse improves the richness of IQ’s analytics and correspondingly improves automated diagnosis.

Also new is Intelligent Service Desk by Aternity that increases service desk and call center efficiency and availability. Unlike other DEM solutions that offer a multitude of remediation scripts designed to address narrow use cases, Aternity sets itself apart with AI-driven intelligent service desk for troubleshooting and resolving recurring device issues before they are raised as tickets. Using customizable workflow processes, Aternity replicates advanced investigations by correlating end-user impact and real-time granular performance data to identify incident root cause. Aternity dynamically mimics expert decision-making by integrating user sentiment with its remediation workflows using composable actions. Its flexible logic employs interactive feedback with optimal engagement levels to resolve simple and complex issues. For unresolved issues, a ticket is routed to the right level with the necessary context for swift resolution.

View this Intelligent Service Desk video to learn more:

For more information, please watch the launch webcast with Riverbed CEO Dave Donatelli and CTO Richard Tworek!

Given the popularity of Teams, Microsoft has significantly enhanced it with the rollout of Teams 2.0, now generally available. Teams 2.0 promises to be faster, more efficient, and more user-friendly than its predecessor. As organizations migrate to the latest version of Teams, the question arises: how do you ensure a successful rollout across potentially thousands of endpoints while maintaining service quality? The answer lies in AI-driven automation.

Riverbed is a leader in unified observability, and our Aternity solution provides intelligent automation and AI-driven insights into digital experiences for employees and customers across all endpoints and devices. The introduction of Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk has been a gamechanger, enabling organizations to dramatically reduce service desk tickets and enhance employee satisfaction. In fact, these capabilities played a crucial role in Riverbed’s successful migration from Slack to Teams 2.0.

Below, let us explore our own use case. 

Embracing digital transformation with real world impact

Like many organizations today, Riverbed’s IT team faces increasing incident volumes and complexity. Coupled with a dispersed, multi-geographical, hybrid workforce, it becomes challenging for IT to schedule time to meet with employees.

Riverbed has adopted the strategic approach of a “shift-left service desk,” focusing on real people, real devices, and real-life scenarios. This strategy ensures the best employee experience during any digital transformation by empowering end users and allowing IT to focus on higher support tiers while eliminating mundane tasks.

Riverbed made the business decision to migrate to Microsoft Teams 2.0 based on its enhanced speed, efficiency, and user-friendliness. With a more streamlined migration experience, Riverbed aimed to make the user experience equally seamless. 

Riverbed Aternity Intelligent Service Desk provides AI-enabled detection, troubleshooting, and logic-driven remediation without human intervention. This puts the employee in the driver seat by allowing them to run their own remediation scripts. With this core capability, Riverbed was able to successfully auto detect any issues employees might be facing while undergoing the migration. 

Simplifying IT intervention with a step-by-step approach

Riverbed’s IT team has seen tremendous value in automating the discovery of issues, thereby preventing resource bottlenecks. The process is straightforward:

1. Identify which employees are experiencing issues with Teams 2.0.
2. Generate a pop-up alert for these employees.
3. Allow employees to execute a runbook script.

The most common issue with the migration to Teams 2.0 was the need to clear the Teams Cache, which could grow to several gigabytes. By identifying who was having an issue, Riverbed could automatically send a pop-up to suggest clearing the cache. If the user selected “yes,” the remediation would run to clear the cache and restart Teams—all within 20 seconds. This procedure was fine-tuned to avoid running if the employee was in an active Teams meeting, thereby enhancing the overall experience and minimizing disruptions.

To date, 63% of Riverbed employees who encountered an issue with Teams 2.0 successfully executed the remediation, leading to fewer IT tickets and less troubleshooting required by the user.

Microsoft provides a variety of management tools for Teams, including Call Analytics, Call Quality Dashboard, and more. With its integration to Teams, Aternity provides similar capabilities, but also enables IT to resolve other troubleshooting issues, such as those caused by anti-virus software, rogue processes, or by the performance of peripherals such as headsets. In addition, capabilities within Aternity—like automated remediation, employee sentiment, and DXI—apply equally to Teams as they do for any other business critical application. 

Aternity prioritizes Teams like a business-critical application—because it is!

This real-life example underscores the value that Riverbed Aternity brings to customers using the Microsoft 365 portfolio. The Aternity agent proactively identifies user experience and performance issues, reducing costs and improving service by empowering the user to decide when to run the remediation.

Common use cases include:

• Service Desk: Measure actual employee experience—do users experience issues across all apps, or just with Teams?
• End User Services: Reduce problem MTTR by correlating Teams call quality with the performance of the underlying device.
• Teams Owner: Gain cross-company insights—compare your Teams performance to the market to identify areas for improvement.
• IT Executives: Focus on continuous improvement—determine where to invest for the greatest impact by tailoring targets against market benchmarks.

Riverbed Aternity enhances Microsoft’s monitoring capabilities by providing actual employee experience for every application in the portfolio. Aternity monitors end user experience for every enterprise application on any physical, virtual, or mobile device.

Download the Aternity solution brief to learn more about how Digital Experience Management can rapidly troubleshoot and validate changes in Microsoft Office, Windows, and Teams.

The Riverbed team had the opportunity to engage with senior decision-makers and policy developers across the UK Government, plus many of those who work directly on the front line. This included experts across UK Defence & Security Exports, Border Force, the Joint Maritime Security Centre, Digital, Data & Technology and related departments, as well as over 350 other suppliers.

The theme of the event was “Collaboration. Innovation. Resilience.” and across the three days, stands were visited, talks were listened to, insights were shared, conversations were had, immersive live demonstrations were eagerly experienced. Here are our most significant takeaways from it all.

There are many ways to work in tech

At Riverbed, we are proud to provide industry-leading IT solutions that empower exceptional digital experiences. But the kind of technology we offer is totally different to some of the advancements we saw on other exhibitors’ stands. It was exciting and eye-opening to explore the innovations from companies that craft weapons, convert police cars, design tactical workwear, and more.

Yet today, each of these organisations is supported by their IT infrastructure; without robust and reliable back-end systems, employees can’t effectively do their jobs, risks can’t be mitigated, and research and development can’t happen at the pace the industry demands. It felt inspiring to speak to representatives from these kinds of organisations who we could, or do, support–knowing we’re contributing to the production of tools and equipment that keep our country safe.

Collaboration is on the rise

In the past, we’ve noticed many technology companies working in closed-off ways, wanting to keep customers in their ecosystem without losing them to competitors. But this attitude seems to be shifting, and it was refreshing to see so many major vendors collaborating to create end-to-end solutions that address all customers’ needs.

We’re proud to be included in this number, as we continuously become more and more open, incorporating third-party data into our platforms to generate the best outcomes for both our customers and peers. We were also delighted that the Government and Home Office were keen to chat with us, as they were looking for ideas and inspiration to improve the way they work.

Response times are of critical importance

When working alongside our customers, it’s often the engineering teams we liaise with–the people who run things, not necessarily those who use things. The event gave us an ideal opportunity to talk to the end users working on the front line, who actually utilise the systems we’re enlisted to transform.

It was fascinating to hear about their challenges and goals, and how their perceptions and experiences can differ from those of the engineering teams. Primarily, responsiveness is top of mind for this group–they don’t think about how smart or snazzy a tool is, as long as it allows them to enter a situation, search for what or who they need, and send an update in an instant. After all, in an emergency situation or warzone, every second counts.

Stand visitors were pleased to hear that Riverbed can help staff at all levels and roles. We’ve helped many customers in this sector to reduce costs, which can then be rerouted to capacity and technology improvements; reducing latency to accelerate system response times; enhancing end-user experiences; and mitigating the need for ‘war rooms’ to resolve issues. Moreover, we’ve empowered other customers to significantly improve their response times, enabling employees to keep colleagues in the loop quicker and more reliably than ever.

While AI can be seen as a threat, it’s also a force for good

Artificial intelligence was, unsurprisingly, one of the event’s hottest discussion points. It’s clear that the technology brings about unprecedented threat in areas such as terrorism, fraud, and economic- and cyber-crime. The Alan Turing Institute gave a particularly interesting talk entitled ‘The Rise of Deepfakes’, exploring how easily and convincingly images and video can now be manipulated, with potentially dangerous consequences.

However, the tech’s positive impact can’t be ignored, as was discussed in a thought-leadership panel our team attended: ‘Applications of Artificial Intelligence in National Security and Policing’. At Riverbed, we use AI and machine learning to automatically find and fix issues in organisations’ networks, often before the end-user even knows there’s been a problem. This enables security and defence companies to break free from blue screens, become more productive, respond to situations faster, and focus on what really matters: protecting people and saving lives.

Seeing high-energy stunts will always be awesome

There’s no doubt that the event provided a great platform for us to share our solutions with those who really need them, and to learn even more about a sector in which we’re deeply embedded.

Still, some of the most awe-striking moments were the live demonstrations performed by the likes of the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service who showcased the latest equipment and skills to fight the most severe fires and rescues from complex car crashes. And the ADS Special Interest groups who presented interactive Counter Threat demonstrations on the UK’s premier capabilities in C-EO, CBRN drones, and Counter drones.

If you work in the Public Sector and find yourself constantly fighting fires across your IT infrastructure, get in touch. We’d be thrilled to move you to a place where you can focus on innovating rather than dealing with your ongoing IT challenges.

With today’s distributed, hybrid workforces, ensuring reliable access to applications is business-critical for most organizations. When application performance is poor, it can negatively impact employee productivity, leading to revenue loss and a decline in customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Few, however, consider that their unoptimized wide area network (WAN) traffic secured by Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols may be to blame for poor application performance and other issues in their network.

WAN acceleration—the technologies and methods used to improve the efficiency of data transfers between centralized data centers and remote locations—is the same regardless of whether the traffic uses SSL/TLS protocols for encryption. Many organizations, however, miss the classic signs that their secured WAN traffic needs optimization. To help start conversations with organizations about WAN acceleration for their SSL/TLS-encrypted traffic, we’ve outlined three signs that their traffic needs optimization.

Sign #1: High network latency

Network latency is the time it takes a data packet to travel from one place in the network to another. Ideally, this would happen at the speed of light, but in the real world, cabling, network equipment traversal, and signal loss hampers transfer speed.

For example, an increase in the number of “hops,” or devices that a packet must travel through, and poor application server performance can cause high latency.

Here are a few signs of high latency:

• Websites load slowly or not at all.
• Applications freeze or stall.
• Interruptions in video and audio streaming.

Ideally, your clients’ should track latency metrics for all their applications across the network. However, this can be difficult. For example, most organizations in 2022 had an average of 130 software as a service (SaaS) applications in use. For most teams, manually tracking latency for 130 applications isn’t possible.

If left unchecked, high latency can hamper employee productivity, making it difficult to collaborate across departments and teams and ultimately impacting job satisfaction and company revenue.

Sign #2: Network Congestion

Network congestion occurs when the transmitted data exceeds the network’s processing capacity. It’s similar to cars in traffic. When the amount of traffic, or data, doesn’t have enough lanes for travel, or transmission, it backs up.

Congestion can slow data transfer and cause packet loss, and there can be many causes behind network congestion. Common causes include overactive devices and applications that use too much bandwidth, poor network configuration, and outdated devices and switches.

If the congestion continues unchecked, it can result in downtime when the network and its applications are unavailable to users. Downtime is expensive, with estimates landing at approximately $5,600 per minute.

Besides unplanned downtime, signs of network congestion include:

• Increased error rates across the network.
• Slow data transfer speeds.
• Frequent application crashes.

Sign #3: Growing data usage and needs

Organizations are using more data. From artificial intelligence (AI) tools to growing data usage in analytics, monitoring, and cybersecurity, it is inescapable. In fact, 46% of organizations in a worldwide survey said they use big data analytics in research.

Earlier, we compared network traffic to traffic we experience on the road: Imagine what would happen if you dramatically increased the number of cars on your four-lane highway. Most companies are investing in big data—larger, more complex data sources—without considering how the increase in data will affect their network traffic.

Getting your clients to considering WAN optimization prior to, or early on, in the process of growing data usage can equip their networks to handle the increase in traffic without causing issues.

How to optimize WAN traffic

Many organizations see the signs and still struggle to optimize their SSL/TLS encrypted traffic. Optimizing WAN traffic encrypted with these protocols requires network teams to decrypt, optimize, and re-encrypt the traffic to ensure it remains secure. The process requires them to collect and manage certificates and private keys. With companies managing hundreds of applications, each with specific certificates, private keys, and expiration dates, the process can be challenging. Because of the challenge, many organizations won’t attempt optimization, or they’ll begin the process but not complete it. This is where you can help. 

Riverbed offers WAN acceleration for SSL/TLS encrypted traffic that simplifies the process. You can recommend multiple deployment options that streamline certificate management with a solution that acts as a trusted man-in-the-middle to optimize traffic securely. The results? Organizations can see up to a 99% reduction in bandwidth consumption and a 10-times acceleration of SSL/TLS encrypted traffic.

Want to learn more about Riverbed’s acceleration solution with SSL/TLS optimization? Download the white paper.

From clinical trials to delivering breakthrough medicines, R&D is the heartbeat of the industry. However, technology challenges can affect productivity, reputation, and ultimately, patient outcomes.

To drive long-term sustainable growth, leading pharmaceutical companies are diving into unified observability: bringing together data, insights, and actions to enable IT teams to improve the digital experience for scientists and technicians. Because time saved is time invested.

Create more time for R&D 

Optimizing the digital experience is imperative for scientific research programs. If lab technicians can’t access their LIMS or bioinformatics tools when they need to, research activities are delayed, increasing R&D downtime and impacting operations.

With unified observability, companies improve as much as 58% their application log-in times and provide a digital experience that gives time back to scientists, while IT teams can ensure that every second saved is a second invested in pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery. 

Unlock revenue potential from business-critical IT systems 

By strategically optimizing their IT environment, pharmaceutical companies can minimize errors, improve application performance, and unlock the full potential of their systems. This optimization leads to streamlined operations and increased productivity across the business.

Ultimately, allowing staff to do what they do best, pharmaceutical companies accelerate the delivery of drugs into the hands of patients, which translates into tangible revenue growth.

Allow your IT teams to focus on high-value projects 

Investing in automated, AI-driven remediation solutions becomes paramount in the shift from transactional to transformational IT. Technical teams can move past doing repetitive tasks to focusing on value-added projects that keep high-performing talent happy and productive.

With up to 70% reduction in MTTR for service desk professionals, unified observability allows pharmaceutical companies to focus on the adoption of new technologies, research, and development processes to improve business and advance growth.

Build brand trust by reducing risk and focusing on quality and sustainability 

There is a need for pharma teams to drive greater focus on consumer experience and communication to avoid loss of influence and authority. Protecting the business against risks through data integrity and a resilient technology foundation is not an option–it’s a necessity.

In addition, increased focus on environmental sustainability and supply chain optimization has become an integral part of all leading pharmaceutical companies. Unified observability allows IT teams to become a part of the solution, by monitoring CO2 emissions from IT assets, as well as implementing smart device refreshes to reduce unnecessary waste, and lowering energy consumption from egress traffic in cloud-based systems.

Unlock the future of Pharma 

In the quest for innovation and efficiency, Riverbed Unified Observability is fueling digital transformation for pharmaceutical companies. It is not just about improving IT infrastructure; it’s about empowering scientists, technicians, and every individual contributing to R&D. Time is money, and with Riverbed Unified Observability, every moment saved is an investment in the future of pharmaceutical excellence. To explore how Riverbed can transform your IT environment and elevate your business, learn more here. 

One significant application is automation, which IBM defines as “the use of technology to perform tasks where human input is minimized.” This is particularly appealing to IT teams and the C-suite for several reasons.

Why automate?

Automation enhances IT delivery by automating manual processes that traditionally required human input. It also enables organizations to gain observability over their infrastructure, applications, and devices, facilitating improved content processing and management; workflow streamlining; data-driven decision-making; cost optimization; network performance enhancement; and proactive incident management.

Perhaps the most desired benefit is this last one: self-healing. As IT leaders take a more prominent role in the boardroom and face increasing scrutiny around digital transformation efforts–efforts that profoundly impact how business value is created and delivered–self-healing brings countless advantages.

It can reduce unplanned outages and eliminate performance issues from user journeys, elevating the customer experience. It can help businesses overcome forecasting challenges, optimizing resources to cut software and infrastructure overcapacity. And it can drive the development of higher-quality applications, reducing testing needs so organizations can bring products to market faster.

However, the path to self-healing isn’t as simple as installing an automation solution and waiting for something to happen, as presumed by many–who are then disappointed in the process when it doesn’t work as planned. To reach an optimum level of maturity and realize their goals, companies should ensure several key elements in the automation process are secured and understood.

It starts and ends with data

Automation is not only a result of AI but also a driver. Any intelligent tech is only as smart as the data you feed it, and to maximize its potential, this data must have clarity, integrity, and fidelity. Plus, it must be fully extracted across all your domains–from your infrastructure and networks to your apps and logs–to build a complete picture and accurate machine-learning model. After all, correlation based on incorrect or fragmented data is nothing more than coincidence.

Take, for example, the financial management apps currently growing in popularity. These connect to your mobile banking accounts and give insight into what you’re spending, where and when. If, let’s say, you have a current account, savings account, and debit and credit cards, it’s critical the app pulls in data from each of these to provide the whole reality of your expenses and lifestyle. Then, you can see what can be improved upon and which spending habits need to change.

This may seem unwelcome news, as so many organizations battle legacy systems that can’t communicate with each other and disparate data stored in silos. Ironically, the ultimate outcome of automation–observability–needs to be present to begin with to unify this fragmented data and get outdated tech talking. Luckily, there are solutions on the market, like Riverbed’s unified observability portfolio, which can do exactly this while unlocking all the advantages of automation.

Building a baseline

The first step on any business’s journey to self-healing is harvesting quality data, and plenty of it. Next, it’s imperative to set a baseline to understand and record what’s usual across systems and devices, so anomalies can be identified and addressed. It’s akin to going to the doctor for a blood test; without keeping accurate and timely medical records, all they could tell you was whether they’d found anything of note in that one particular sample, regardless of how well or unwell you were feeling. By examining your record and taking samples over time, healthcare professionals can detect deviations in data points, identifying if anything is amiss based on your unique baseline. They seek out one-off or recurring problems and prescribe medication to get you back to full health.

A baseline tends to be established based on mathematical machine-learning formulas, which aren’t one-size-fits-all. Application data, network data, end-user data and infrastructure data are all different, and should be treated and tracked as such. That’s why, for over 20 years, Riverbed has carried out packet analysis that gives us the flexibility to use the best formulas and data science in the best possible places, driving the incident correlations businesses need.

Next stop: self-healing

Once an effective baseline is established, automation can finally start. But to automate the healing process, businesses must first automate the detection process, introducing scripts that alert to incidents and where they’re coming from. This helps avoid false positives and human errors while allowing for the correlation of individual issues, identifying bigger problems and their roots to accelerate mean time to detect (MTTD) or mean time to know (MTTK). Then, finally, the self-healing process can begin.

After streamlining data collection, baseline setting, and incident detection and correlation, most of the hard work is done. Now, automation scripts can be used to speed up mean time to fix (MTTF) or mean time to repair (MTTR)–addressing situations before users complain and driving ongoing optimizations.

In summary, to receive the highest quality output from any automation system, it’s vital that businesses take the time and make the investment to give AI models the greatest possible input. Businesses must prioritize comprehensive problem management and continuous system feedback to achieve reliable self-healing capabilities.

Do you have the robust data and effective machine-learning mechanism you need to achieve foolproof self-healing? If not, Riverbed can help. Get in touch with us today to learn how.

• Maintaining seamless IT infrastructure performance.
• Ensuring optimal utilisation of critical applications and medical devices.
• Facilitating a productive environment for healthcare professionals.

AIOps is reshaping cost efficiency within healthcare organisations, revolutionising the way healthcare is delivered, and setting new standards for operational excellence. All the while, it supports a spend-to-save initiative in the healthcare sector, allowing organisations to fully utilise their investments and achieve more with less.

Here’s how these tools can help healthcare organisations overcome the aforementioned obstacles by providing real-time insights into the performance of critical systems, applications, and devices–enabling leaders to make informed decisions that drive cost efficiency, elevate productivity, and enhance experiences.

Maximise hardware and asset refresh budgets

Spending funds efficiently and with care can maximise impact on Trusts. Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust (KCHFT), one of England’s largest NHS community health providers, serving a population of about 1.4 million. It oversees more than 5,000 staff and hundreds of applications and hardware assets. KCHFT prides itself on being responsive to its patients’ needs and sought to gain end-to-end visibility into its application and hardware performance. To this end, achieve this, KCHFT’s IT team deployed unified observability, offering up-to-the-minute insight into device usage and overall health.

This approach allows the Trust to replace, refurbish, recycle or remove hardware based on its remaining life rather than physical age. Darren Spinks, Head of IT Operations at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, shared: “Riverbed showed us we wouldn’t need to replace 42% of our 1,784 devices aged five years or older. This has meant that we’ve already returned our investment.” Additionally, these platforms pinpoint the exact usage of licenses, allowing Trusts to establish which are truly required; two NHS Trusts have demonstrated they could save between £130k and £230k on their software licence costs.

Reduce service desk tickets and free up time to improve patient care

Within the NHS, there’s a growing need to “shift left” in the service desk using intelligent automation and self-healing. Unified observability meets this need by combining full-fidelity cross-domain data, machine learning, correlation and more for faster problem-solving. As a result, Trusts can accelerate incident response, minimise security risks, populate trouble tickets with supporting data, guide remediation of desktop issues, and automate recovery actions.

It initially took time for KCHFT to determine the root cause of performance problems, so it saw the benefit of this first-hand. Spinks told us: “Riverbed’s solution alerted us hours before our service desk received a call regarding the incident. Now, we don’t need to wait for a user to tell us there’s a problem. It informs us of the issue, its impact, and the implications regarding time and cost.”

Another UK customer, The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust (PAHT), serves a local population of around 350,000 people and provides a full range of general acute, outpatient, and diagnostic services. It’s gone from receiving 629 service desk tickets outside its SLA to consistent single figures using auto-remediation, which it employs around 10,000 times a month. This ensures that all staff members feels supported and more productive, freeing up their time for them to focus on what really matters: patient care.

Improve experiences for clinicians and patients

In today’s hybrid world, every interaction matters, and healthcare organisations must measure and manage digital experiences (DEX) for both staff and the people they serve–then strive to make them more compelling. Riverbed identifies and optimises DEX hot spots, creates efficient pathways to streamline workflows for clinicians, practitioners, nurses, and consultants, and empowers all employees to deliver the quality of service and responsiveness patients expect and deserve.

PAHT’s ICT team found that 947 hours were lost each quarter due to unresponsive blue screens, negatively impacting patient care. Riverbed’s unified observability platform has reduced this to 211 hours. Jeffrey Wood, Deputy Director of ICT at the Trust, explained: “After deploying Riverbed’s unified observability solutions, we reduced the number of application crashes (by hang) by nearly 50%. We’ve saved almost 700 hours, around 28 days per month, which we’re effectively giving back to clinicians.”

Furthermore, many applications used by staff were legacy-based, unstable, and challenging to maintain due to the age of hospital devices–65% of which were seven years old or older, and 85% of which were PC desktops rather than more mobile laptops. Riverbed’s Aternity solution provided full visibility across the end-user experience, uncovering the impact of outdated devices on their infrastructure. It also empowered them to proactively fix issues before clinicians even notice, boosting work rate by 25%, staff satisfaction, and patient outcomes.

Stay sustainable

Unified observability solutions can help organisations reduce their carbon footprint while cutting costs and meet long-term sustainability goals like achieving net zero. In March 2023, PAHT required the carbon equivalent of 4,000 trees to offset idle user devices. With our data and automation tools, they’ve reduced this to around 733 trees, realising £200k in-year savings on electricity bills in the process. Altogether, these could deliver more than £1.2 million in savings to the board.

Overall, the ICT team at PAHT will see a £3 million saving over a three-to-five-year period thanks to Riverbed’s unified observability, while improving outcomes–now spending just under 40% of their time fighting fires, down from 85-90%. On average, our NHS customers experience a 58% acceleration in application login times, a 40% average reduction in IT spend on hardware refresh, and a 70% reduction in Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

Trust us to help you achieve similarly incredible results–driving in-year savings, elevating productivity, and enhancing experiences for everyone. Reach out today to learn how. Together, we can unleash the full potential of your infrastructure and unlock the power of your investments, from server room to operating room to boardroom.

With today’s distributed, hybrid workforces, ensuring reliable access to applications is business-critical for most organizations. When application performance is poor, it can negatively impact employee productivity, leading to revenue loss and a decline in customer satisfaction and brand reputation. Few, however, consider that their unoptimized wide area network (WAN) traffic secured by Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols may be to blame for poor application performance and other issues in their network.

WAN acceleration—the technologies and methods used to improve the efficiency of data transfers between centralized data centers and remote locations—is the same regardless of whether the traffic uses SSL/TLS protocols for encryption. Many organizations, however, miss the classic signs that their secured WAN traffic needs optimization. To help organizations start the process of WAN acceleration for their SSL/TLS-encrypted traffic, we’ve gathered three signs that your traffic needs optimization.

Sign #1: High network latency

Network latency is the time it takes a data packet to travel from one place in the network to another. Ideally, this would happen at the speed of light, but in the real world, cabling, network equipment traversal, and signal loss hampers transfer speed.

For example, an increase in the number of “hops,” or devices that a packet must travel through, and poor application server performance can cause high latency.

Here are a few signs of high latency:

• Websites load slowly or not at all.
• Applications freeze or stall.
• Interruptions in video and audio streaming.

Ideally, your organization should track latency metrics for all your applications across the network. However, this can be difficult. For example, most organizations in 2022 had an average of 130 software as a service (SaaS) applications in use. For most teams, manually tracking latency for 130 applications isn’t possible.

If left unchecked, high latency can hamper employee productivity, making it difficult to collaborate across departments and teams and ultimately impacting job satisfaction and company revenue.

Sign #2: Network Congestion

Network congestion occurs when the transmitted data exceeds the network’s processing capacity. It’s similar to cars in traffic. When the amount of traffic, or data, doesn’t have enough lanes for travel, or transmission, it backs up.

Congestion can slow data transfer and cause packet loss, and there can be many causes behind network congestion. Common causes include overactive devices and applications that use too much bandwidth, poor network configuration, and outdated devices and switches.

If the congestion continues unchecked, it can result in downtime when the network and its applications are unavailable to users. Downtime is expensive, with estimates landing at approximately $5,600 per minute.

Besides unplanned downtime, signs of network congestion include:

• Increased error rates across the network.
• Slow data transfer speeds.
• Frequent application crashes.

Sign #3: Growing data usage and needs

Organizations are using more data. From artificial intelligence (AI) tools to growing data usage in analytics, monitoring, and cybersecurity, it is inescapable. In fact, 46% of organizations in a worldwide survey said they use big data analytics in research.

Earlier, we compared network traffic to traffic we experience on the road: Imagine what would happen if you dramatically increased the number of cars on your four-lane highway. Most companies are investing in big data—larger, more complex data sources—without considering how the increase in data will affect their network traffic.

Considering WAN optimization prior to, or early on, in the process of growing data usage can equip your network to handle the increase in traffic without causing issues.

How to optimize your WAN traffic

Many organizations see the signs and still struggle to optimize their SSL/TLS encrypted traffic. Optimizing WAN traffic encrypted with these protocols requires network teams to decrypt, optimize, and re-encrypt the traffic to ensure it remains secure. The process requires them to collect and manage certificates and private keys. With companies managing hundreds of applications, each with specific certificates, private keys, and expiration dates, the process can be challenging. Because of the challenge, many organizations won’t attempt optimization, or they’ll begin the process but not complete it.

Riverbed offers WAN acceleration for SSL/TLS encrypted traffic that simplifies the process. Companies can choose from multiple deployment options that streamline certificate management with a solution that acts as a trusted man-in-the-middle to optimize traffic securely. The results? Organizations can see up to a 99% reduction in bandwidth consumption and a 10-times acceleration of SSL/TLS encrypted traffic.

Want to learn more about Riverbed’s acceleration solution with SSL/TLS optimization? Download the white paper.

Enter Riverbed Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk—a game-changer designed to propel your IT Service Desk into a new world of:

• Significantly Reduced IT Costs
• Lower Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
• Enhanced IT Productivity
• Streamlined Automated Remediation

The cornerstone of Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk is its ability to trigger low-code runbooks upon any alert. These runbooks, with their drag-and-drop interface, allow for the definition of troubleshooting logic through nodes packed with pre-built code, enabling you to:

• Navigate complex decision paths effortlessly.
• Make external calls for swift remediation actions.
• Retrieve third-party data seamlessly.

Let’s delve into a couple of real examples which showcase what this new capability can help your teams achieve.

Remedy low disk space

As trivial as it sounds, running low on disk space can be quite debilitating and drastically affect end-user productivity, comparable to the frustration of slow boot times. In the runbook shown below, each of the colorful nodes contain pre-defined code for various functions such as making external API calls, decision logic, visualization and more—and it works like a flow chart.

Once an alert triggers this runbook, execution starts. Next it does the obvious: promptly identifies potential space savings by clearing the usual suspects like temporary files and emptying the recycle bin. If that gives back substantial free space, then the lower path from the decision branch executes the remediation logic through a web call and displays the result as part of the runbook output. Conversely, if the initial cleanup does not free enough space and manual investigation is needed, the runbook calls an API to list the top few files and folders by size from the device (via the Aternity REST API), automatically generates a ServiceNow incident, and provides the top files and folders by size in the incident description. That way, when the technician looks at it, the next steps become obvious.

Resolve application startup problems

Consider the case with CAD applications, where large files frequently move between the user’s device and a SaaS back-end, posing unique challenges. Here is an example from an actual scenario faced by one of our customers experiencing frequent a flood of issues with the CAD native Windows application hanging and abruptly crashing.

This runbook springs into action upon detecting an application crash event in the user’s Windows event log. Upon executing, the runbook first tries to look for file timeouts (obtained via call to Aternity API). If it sees timeouts, it runs a traceroute to typical destinations for the SaaS backend hosts and conducts a speed test to check whether the user’s bandwidth could be a culprit.

With conclusive evidence of timeouts, the runbook compiles the results from traceroute, speed test, and file timeouts into a ServiceNow incident for further action. If no timeouts are detected, the runbook can send a notification to the user (similar to below) to ask their permission to automatically open a ticket on their behalf.

Empower your IT Service Desk

Gone are the days of manual troubleshooting, triaging, and remedying every service desk ticket. With the power of Riverbed Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk, innovative low-code runbooks take on the tedious work of triage and troubleshooting, delivering insightful results. To explore more about how the Intelligent Service Desk can transform your IT operations, please visit our website.

Enter Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk, a game-changer in the realm of IT automation. Aternity’s AI-powered Intelligent Service Desk proactively addresses recurring device issues before they become tickets. With the use of its LogiQ Engine and customizable runbooks, Aternity replicates advanced investigations by correlating end-user impact and real-time performance data to pinpoint incident root causes. Aternity dynamically models expert decision-making and integrates sentiment survey into its remediation workflows, resolving issues before human intervention.

Here are eight compelling reasons why your enterprise should embrace this transformative technology:

Prevent incidents

With its AI-enabled issue detection and correlation, Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk proactively identifies application and device issues before they escalate into full-blown incidents. Aternity employs the right combination of remediation actions, decision-making and user feedback to effectively resolve an issue before a ticket is raised. This prevents service disruptions, keeping your workforce productive while eliminating costs associated with raising a ticket.

Improve AI outcomes

With Aternity’s full-fidelity telemetry, embedded AI and intelligent automation, IT can expect superior outcomes in incident resolution. Many DEX tools often lack the granularity required to pinpoint underlying issues accurately. To make the most of AI models, companies need DEX platforms that can ingest and correlate large amounts of data across devices, applications, and the network. Furthermore, effective AI/ML models require data that is centralized, complete, granular, and stable to map dependencies and build contextual models. With its ability to process high fidelity data, Aternity delivers intelligence and precision for remediation.

Intelligently ticket with your ITSM tools

Aternity seamlessly integrates with existing IT Service Management (ITSM) tools, such as ServiceNow. For any unresolved issues that are more complex or nuanced, Aternity will create, escalate and route a ticket with the right priority to the right team. By feeding user-centric and dynamic insights directly into tickets, Aternity streamlines the ticketing process, significantly reducing time associated with manual diagnostics while ensuring swift resolution.

Empower human ingenuity

Human decision fatigue is a major challenge due to the overwhelming volume of tasks and information. AI offers a solution by enhancing decision-making through intelligent automation and insights. By automating repetitive, low-value tasks, organizations can reduce decision fatigue, empowering Digital Workplace teams to proactively address digital experience issues and expedite decision-making. With its Intelligent Service Desk capabilities, Aternity frees up time for employees so they can focus on innovation and creativity.

Improve the voice of the user

By integrating user feedback into its Intelligent Service Desk workflows, Aternity ensures that the voice of the user is heard. Effective response to user feedback is paramount in driving positive DEX outcomes. Traditional feedback mechanisms often suffer from inefficiencies, with critical insights getting lost in the noise of irrelevant data. Sentiment surveys enable organizations to correlate and streamline user feedback processes. By prioritizing and resolving issues based on user feedback and impact, Aternity improves user happiness.

Improve energy efficiency

As part of its Sustainable IT capabilities, Aternity offers automation and actionable insights for managing energy consumption and carbon emissions at both the individual and organization level. By proactively addressing device issues and optimizing performance, Aternity helps improve energy efficiency across your enterprise. With Aternity Intelligent Service Desk, enterprises can automate power settings on devices based on consumption patterns or the user’s profile.

Reduce IT costs

By automating and resolving recurring issues, Aternity helps reduce IT costs significantly through incident prevention. Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk capabilities have helped enterprises save more than $10 Million dollars annually through a reduction in ticket volume, proactive outreach and decrease in manual tasks.

Implement a VIP Service Desk

With Aternity’s customizable runbooks and self-service remediation capabilities, enterprises can implement a VIP Service Desk tailored to the needs of valuable users. By delivering higher service levels and personalized support based on user status or location, Aternity helps enhance the digital experience for VIP users, driving increased loyalty and satisfaction.

By leveraging intelligent automation, AI-driven insights, and seamless integration with ITSM tools, Aternity Intelligent Service Desk empowers organizations and Service Desk teams. This technology sets a new standard for proactive, user-centered IT service, driving efficiency, reducing costs, and ultimately fostering a more productive, satisfied workforce. In a world where digital agility and resilience are paramount, Aternity’s Intelligent Service Desk is essential for enterprises aiming to thrive in the competitive digital landscape.

To remain relevant, win new customers, and increase revenue streams, banks must redefine all they know. That means maintaining and modernizing core internal processes, ramping up digitalization to meet changing customer expectations and increase profitability. Read on to discover how banks can combine data, insights, and actions to run operations more efficiently, enabling faster, more effective decision-making that drives transformational initiatives to improve the omni-channel experience for employees and customers—all powered by Riverbed Unified Onservability.

Reimagine your banking systems—and run your bank better

The technology that quite literally puts banking in consumers’ hands also threatens the traditional banking models. To realize the full potential of their banking systems–reducing errors, improving application performance, and making staff more effective–these firms must reinvigorate branches and refine the services they deliver.

Primarily, this involves removing barriers between tellers and customers, introducing self-service kiosks, and supercharging their online and mobile offerings. However, a reliance on tech requires systems to operate as smoothly and reliably as possible. This is challenging when faced with huge volumes of data and legacy infrastructure that anchor banks to the past instead of propelling them into the present.

Thanks to unified observability’s automated remediation and self-healing capabilities, banks can easily resolve problems across their entire architecture before customers notice a disruption, thereby safeguarding the business’s reputation and building all-important trust among consumers. In fact, one of our clients used these tools to proactively reduce their support tickets by 20-30% a month.

By detecting and fixing problems faster, banks can achieve strategic optimizations, increase efficiencies, accelerate mean time to repair, and reduce time spent on non-critical issues. What’s more, they can eliminate alert fatigue, significantly reducing the number of notifications staff must go through, thereby lowering stress levels and turnover rates. This is critical during a time of talent and skills shortages.

Banks can use unified observability to simplify their setup, streamline operations and directly cut costs, too, by identifying under-utilized tech and optimizing networks, devices, and apps that are relied on the most. Another Riverbed client saved an estimated £600,000 on each application they examined using our technology. One more bank found they could avoid a $16M upgrade by maximizing the hardware they already had.

Reimagine modernization—and change your bank faster

Today’s consumers crave convenience, generally favoring the digital banking experience only apps and online portals can provide. However, even as banks’ physical footprints shrink, the in-person experience is still crucial and shouldn’t be underestimated.

With unified observability, banks can empower the in-branch experience by providing live reporting of ATMs and colleague operations, the same automated remediation tools mentioned earlier, change validation, and more. A banking client of ours found their remaining branches were working disparately, delivering different levels of teller service in each location. Using our tools, they could identify this and stabilize the situation to offer one consistent experience. Another went from having 1,000 employees working from home to 22,000 in a mere four weeks. They used our platform to gain visibility on who was working where and when and see which offices they could close–reducing costs without losing productivity.

As consumers navigate between online, mobile banking and physical branch, contact center or ATM visits, it’s vital that banks create a tech environment where each interaction is efficient and fit for future-ready, customer-centric, omni-channel banking. Unified observability platforms ensure that every app, across every device, within every channel consistently delivers and exceeds the level of service necessary to drive business, rather than hinder it.

Reimagine the banking journey—and perfect the experience

Banks must optimize every customer touchpoint, whatever their requirement, moving from transactional to transformational and ensuring exceptional experiences. This means empowering their staff to unlock new revenue opportunities and improve customer support, with AI-driven end-to-end visibility across the omni-channel experience.

Unified observability allows organizations to transform disparate data into intelligent user insights, making these the driving force behind increased revenue streams. Many of our clients focus heavily on digital experience improvement, utilizing unified observability to identify potential upgrades to networks and devices, compare employee experiences and productivity levels, and track how satisfied each business unit is before, during, and after implementing changes, such as new software versions.

Reimagine security and sustainability—to adapt to the future

Increasing dependence on the cloud, SaaS, and shadow IT, along with the permanent shift to hybrid work, is evolving the regulatory landscape and expanding the range of security and compliance threats within the banking industry. Meanwhile, banks must meet stringent regulations to operate legally, maintain financial stability, manage risks effectively, protect their reputation, and build trust among customers and stakeholders.

We use our unified observability technology to help businesses build brand strength, underpinned by monitoring performance. They can ensure compliance and identify and address vulnerabilities simply and innovatively, by modernizing existing core banking applications with artificial intelligence and automation, transforming branch networks, adding governance and control tools, and basing decisions on essential data. Our solutions can audit app usage and even capture and store every packet and flow, aiding in threat-hunting investigations and analysis into suspicious network behavior.

As well as being security-conscious, today’s banks are increasingly focused on sustainability to stay relevant in a world where consumer loyalty is fleeting and making a difference to the planet means more than making a profit.

Unified observability can support sustainability strategies and guide banks on their path to net zero in many ways. One way it helps is by identifying devices and infrastructure with high energy consumption, alerting staff to the resource they’re using and reminding them to power down while their devices are idle. It can even remotely turn off energy-draining hardware, like laptops, when not in action.

Experience the future

By fusing data, insights, and actions, Riverbed helps banks enable faster, more effective decision-making and continuously improve the omni-channel experience for employees and customers. Get in touch today to learn more about how our unified observability solutions can empower you to unlock the future of banking, where experience is everything.

This data can be leveraged to deliver the exceptional experiences customers and staff demand–but only if it’s captured, monitored, and used to its full potential. If it isn’t, it can create more than just a headache, making it difficult to identify and address issues, which can affect passengers and your reputation.

While countless tools are available on the market to help you tame and transform this data into something useful, very few of them are comprehensive and holistic, giving observability across your entire infrastructure. Riverbed steps in with its unified observability platform, highlighting qualified and actionable events before they require reactive measures. Here are a few ways Riverbed empowers airlines to do more with data, focus on the broader picture, and achieve superior outcomes.

Enhancing the customer and employee experience

Your passengers expect easy and efficient experiences from the moment they choose to fly with you. Everything from booking tickets on your website to checking in on their smartphone, dropping bags at your kiosk and enjoying in-flight entertainment must be seamless and satisfying. Meet these needs, and they’ll already be looking forward to their next trip with you–fail to, and they’ll simply travel with someone else in future.

Riverbed can help you meet and exceed the most challenging customer demands by optimizing connectivity and application delivery for reliable reservation systems, ticket processes and check-in, and real-time flight updates.

Employees, too, are driven by their experiences. Their job satisfaction decreases, and they become more likely to leave when they are burdened with outdated IT systems, frequent downtime, and poor data management. Riverbed’s automation and self-healing capabilities free people from fighting fires so they can focus on what really matters, while its user-friendly dashboards make data easy to understand–and services and projects a breeze to prioritize.

Providing unmatched visibility and insight

For smooth operations, even during cloud migrations, you need real-time visibility across all your IT services and your entire infrastructure, applications, and back-end systems. One of the United States’ major airlines was having trouble gaining this across common-use areas. That is, areas of airports that aren’t owned or leased by airlines, where pilots and other staff will go to check manifestos, schedules, route changes, incidents and more. Often, connections would drop between the airport and the airline, offering no reason why–or instructions on what staff needed to do next.

Riverbed IQ, part of our Unified Observability Platform, has empowered the airline to bridge the gap, identifying problems and providing workarounds to deliver team members the information they need to do their jobs effectively. In future, we’ll be working together to move to an AI operations platform–using automation to speed things up, provide even more insight, eliminate the need for war rooms and lower mean time to recovery.

One of the airline’s IT leaders said: “Riverbed IQ is helping my team realize a self-healing network. Using the built-in features of runbooks and AI/ML, we can reduce the number of alerts and capitalize on our automation processes to perform corrective actions to the network before users experience impact. Riverbed IQ is a game changer in monitoring and unified observability.”

Maintaining the performance of critical apps

As we touched on earlier, your apps are more plentiful and vital than ever. One airline we work with has between 1,200 and 2,000 apps – all of which are needed day-to-day – from flight-planning systems and online ticketing to call-center monitoring.

We drove digital transformation and cloud growth for another major US airline, which was tied down by legacy data centers and struggling to innovate as a result. Using Riverbed AppResponse and Riverbed NetProfiler tools, the organization was able to gain full telemetry and proactive problem-solving across their critical reservations system–keeping it running and running well. Since deployment, the airline’s been able to:

• Set a baseline for performance, and see when this isn’t being met
• Map application transactions and become more process-orientated
• Carry out network performance analysis and optimization using both up-to-the-minute and historical data
• Troubleshoot issues and remedy them automatically, at the root
• Integrate our telemetry with customer incident management tools and processes
• Receive real-time alerts that really matter, reducing notification fatigue
• Achieve all this across every one of its cloud and hybrid environments

Boosting sustainability

The aviation industry is under increasing pressure to reduce its carbon footprint–depending less on jet fuel and improving waste management. Riverbed captures actual performance data from all applications and devices, translating it into actionable environmental insights to help you reduce your carbon emissions and protect our planet.

This could mean identifying hotspots in energy consumption, or printers and the number of pages they’ve produced, and automatically minimizing their impact. It may involve finding idle devices that should be shut down–notifying the user to do so and powering off remotely if they don’t respond. Or it might look like quantifying the carbon footprint of user activities, such as sending emails. The possibilities are countless, each supporting you on your journey to net zero while improving your reputation with stakeholders, passengers, and the media.

There’s no doubt that Riverbed’s solutions are changing the game for airlines, elevating digital experiences and putting organizations’ data to work for them. Get in touch with our team now and find out how we can empower you to satisfy the people who matter, stay out of the news, streamline your operations, and speed past the competition.

“Charting cyberspace is all about people, processes and technology.”

Colonel (Retired) Joseph Pishock knows more than most about the topic of Cybersecurity Manoeuvrability. Presenting to a packed out auditorium at MilCIS 2023 in Canberra, he discussed the challenges of managing a regulated and compliant (DODiN) network that had had “25 years of building one thing on top of another.”

Pishock spent 25 years in the United States Army before becoming the Director of Global Networks & Services in US SOCOM (Special Operations Command) in August 2020. At the time, Pishock considered cyberspace effectively uncharted, guided only by Visio diagrams (that may or may not have been accurate) that made it difficult for his team to troubleshoot effectively.

Pishock’s military experience meant he was very familiar with the saying, “move, shoot, communicate”, which is all about being in control and manoeuvring on the battlefield. However, when it came to supporting SOCOM, Pishock discovered that although he had a “wall of plasma”, he had no control. He knew he’d have to delve deeper into why a simple email couldn’t be delivered in a timely manner and why this had become a problem in the first place.

When it comes to managing cyberspace, there are three main considerations:

1. People
2. Processes
3. Technology

Pishock had highly intelligent people from top universities (including MIT and Columbia) in his team. But he realised that while they were great at reading checklists and following processes, they lacked the right tools and data to make decisions. True manoeuvrability would be impossible without this, which led to a collaboration with Riverbed to begin the process of mapping cyberspace.

“It’s important to provide the right tools to the right people and empower them to make decisions.”

Pishock and his team worked closely with Riverbed to deploy the latter’s Riverbed software and hardware, including Network & Infrastructure Performance Management, to instrument SOCOM applications and services. To create visibility across the network and empower decision-making, data visualisation was key. It was important that information be as consumable as possible for the intended audience, as different data means different things to different teams.

Infrastructure tooling collected detailed information about the network to build out a visual representation of the assets and the connections between them – known as a service map. Sensors also recorded temperature and other environmental data so that trends could be established.

Network tooling enabled SOCOM to visualise where communications were moving across the network and how efficiently it could do it. SOCOM could now also see who was consuming each service, where the service was, and how it was performing.

On September 23, 2022, Hurricane Ian hit Tampa, Florida, where SOCOM headquarters is located. Being just 11 feet (3.3 metres) above sea level and 100 feet (30.5 metres) from the coast, the threat required a complete site evacuation and a move to COOP (Continuity of Operations) locations, including hotels and alternate bases to keep people safe. If all of this wasn’t enough, Pishock faced the challenge of supporting a live mission and maintaining services with the data centre located about two feet (600mm) above seawater.

In a crisis there are always single points of failure and in this case, it came down to a rat chewing through an air conditioning system power cord in the on-premise data centre. The air-conditioning failed and the temperature in the data centre rose to a dangerous level. It was not safe to send people into an evacuated site during a hurricane, so a decision had to be made as to which services were essential for the live mission and which services could be turned off.

Fortunately, they were about six months into the Riverbed deployment, and Pishock felt in control for the first time. He was able to see which services were located where, and his team were able to determine which services could be turned off to slow the steadily rising temperature. They had a map of cyberspace and were able to save the data centre infrastructure from damage caused by overheating, successfully supporting the mission during the crisis.

Riverbed’s expertise ensured a speedy implementation that worked first time. After facing some initial pushback from team members who saw change as a threat to their role, he addressed this by creating a sense of security and camaraderie amongst his staff and building a blameless culture. He leveraged the Burke Lewin model for organisational change to embed the solution into the fabric of SOCOM and ensure that the solution was maintained and supported into the future.

“The team at Riverbed blended into the project and became integral to the success of the project.”

After the hurricane, Pishock focused on further improving services within SOCOM and enhancing the organisation’s ability to support customers, which included end-user experience management. Device Mobility became a priority to understand what delays occurred from the point a CAC card was inserted into the laptop to opening the first email.

Prior to the end of the session, Pishock fielded questions about data and customer centricity versus network centricity and how shared infrastructure can help reduce the amount of technology that needs to be sent into the field during a mission.

“Email is not a crisis. Make the real crisis the new crisis.”

Colonel (R) Pishock featured in Australia’s Defence Connect Podcast where he discussed his experience of moving past the linear concept of PACE in order see well enough to actually manoeuvre through cyberspace.

An article was also published after an interview with Colonel (R) Pishock.

However, there’s a simple way to maintain control of and access your infrastructure: unified observability solutions like the portfolio from Riverbed. With its innovative automation and self-healing capabilities, unified observability makes managing your tech in-house easier than ever. The platform pulls together big data from all your digital touchpoints, prioritizing tasks to minimize manual processes, mitigate alert fatigue, and accelerate mean time to repair.

Here’s how it’s empowering insurance firms like yours to achieve their most critical goals, right now:

Revolutionizing the customer experience

Every insurance company wants to be the go-to brand for customers, and front of mind when prospects are choosing who to protect them. To achieve this, it’s crucial to equip your staff the tools they need to understand and connect with the people you serve and understand their behaviors and habits. Essentially, improving the customer experience depends on enhancing the employee experience; allowing staff to do their jobs seamlessly, effectively, and productively, and they’ll be satisfied and better equipped to fulfill the evolving digital preferences of customers.

Perhaps a customer wants to pay less for health insurance, as their smartwatch data proves they live an active lifestyle, or maybe another only drives for work and needs to pause car insurance fees over the weekend.

Whoever your customer is and whatever their unique situation, they’ll also expect perfect uptime and availability of your services–on whichever connected devices they access them, from intelligent home devices to the standard smartphone. And if they have any queries or problems, they’d ideally like to deal with you through a clued-up chatbot rather than hanging around on hold for hours.

The chances are you already have the necessary data to meet these seemingly impossible demands. You just have too much of it, stored in disparate silos, and no way of making sense of it all. Enter Riverbed Unified Observability, which uses AI and machine learning to instantly and automatically show you this information on easily understandable single-pane dashboards. This means you can focus less on manual processes and customer service woes and more on strategy, tailoring your products to real desires rather than your best guess.

One of our global reinsurance customers used Riverbed for exactly that, saying: “Now that we have Riverbed’s Digital Experience Management solution, we have already seen benefits in terms of gaining insights we can act upon to improve delivery of services to our customers.”

Enhancing efficiencies to compete and grow

Today, your competitors aren’t the long-established, tried-and-trusted insurance brokers of old. They’re the snappy FinTech start-ups taking the market by storm–born in the cloud, without legacy tech or the burden of premises holding them back. To keep up, you’ll need to make changes, like moving critical applications to the cloud and reducing your physical footprint (which can also help cut your carbon footprint).

With Riverbed, you can become more streamlined than ever before, putting you not just on the same footing as these responsive newcomers but also ahead of the game. By capturing, analyzing, and giving up-to-the-minute insight on every action taken by employees and customers– then automatically creating shortcuts, remedying issues, and highlighting or even switching off underutilized machines–the platform takes care of the everyday so you can look after what really matters, like planning for your future growth. It also works effortlessly across hybrid environments, supporting you as you transition to the cloud.

The reinsurance customer mentioned earlier also used Riverbed to integrate cloud provider data with endpoint metrics, providing accurate customer experience information and identifying CPU processing issues across 80 locations. They said: “Riverbed’s Digital Experience solution allowed us to identify issues quicker, troubleshoot and validate them. Sometimes, issues seem fixed, but from a customer perspective, the problem persists. With Riverbed’s solutions, we are able to collaborate with other IT departments and vendors to get the issue resolved more effectively.”

Becoming more sustainable

All businesses must become more eco-friendly, not just to protect our planet but to uphold their reputation, too. Customers want to use companies they believe in, support, and trust, especially when it comes to insurance, By proving you care about the environment, you show you care about the people within it, too. It’s about driving genuine, meaningful change–such as leading on climate action, forging lasting community ties, operating sustainably, and reaching that net-zero milestone in the not-too-distant future.

Unified observability can help you reduce the amount of office space and server-room storage you need by supporting your transition to the cloud and hybrid working. It can give insight into unused or underperforming devices, allowing you to sweat the assets–recycling or refurbishing them only when they reach the end of their working life. It can also tell you when staff have stepped away from laptops for a prolonged period without shutting down, nudging them to do so with a notification or powering off remotely. As well as providing undeniable environmental benefits, these actions can save you money. One of our UK-based insurance customers is aiming for cost savings of £750 million by the end of 2024–a reality made possible with Riverbed’s Unified Observability and Acceleration portfolios.

Meanwhile, our global reinsurance customer used this function in Riverbed’s Unified Observability Platform to extend the lifecycle of its machines from three years to four. They said: “Moving forward, Riverbed can help us make decisions on hardware replacement, whether to replace laptops or desktops entirely, or whether to replace individual hardware components. This has the potential to increase the effective use of our finite resources and target customers who really need our assistance.”

To learn how your insurance company can maximize existing investments, delight staff and customers, embrace digital transformation, and remain competitive now and in the future, get in touch with our dedicated team now.

• Rapidly evolving consumer behavior: The COVID pandemic has shifted customers from physical stores to online platforms, demanding exceptional digital experiences. Even with brick-and-mortar stores back in operation, consumers continue to expect seamless service across websites and apps. According to Riverbed’s 2023 Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) survey, which polled 1,800 business and IT decision-makers across 10 countries and seven industries, 96% of retail leaders believe that offering a seamless digital experience is crucial (with 59% considering it critically important) for competitive advantage.
• Technological advancements: Artificial intelligence. Augmented reality. Cloud. SaaS. Virtualization. The pace of technology has never been faster, spurred by the rise of hybrid work and escalating customer expectations. It can seem impossible for retailers to know what to invest in and where they’ll see the best return on investment, without adding to an already-complex technology stack.
• Financial constraints: It’s expensive to run a retail store. Let alone several, let alone several hundred. It’s even costlier when staff can’t work to their full potential or productivity due to shortages and skills gaps. Despite this, teams are still expected to reduce costs through IT optimization while satisfying both customers and employees.

If these challenges sound familiar, you might have explored or invested in digital tools to address them. Yet, deploying more (and more complex) solutions can introduce new issues. Below, we outline three common digital hurdles and how Riverbed Unified Observability can help.

Operational inefficiencies

Better tech doesn’t necessarily mean better organization, and retailers often struggle with operational inefficiencies that can impact productivity and profitability. These inefficiencies can stem from factors like supply chain complexities, poor inventory management, and disjointed communication among employees.

Unified observability steps in as a comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform, providing real-time insights into operational performance. By capturing and analyzing data from end-user devices, applications, and networks, it helps identify bottlenecks, streamline processes, and optimize resource allocation, leading to improved operational efficiency.

End-User experience gaps

You know you must deliver seamless, personalized experiences to attract and retain customers. But you’ve also got to provide your employees with these exceptional experiences, and 95% of retail leaders recently surveyed believe they’ll need to provide more advanced digital experiences as new generations of employees enter the labor market.

This is a crucial point for you to consider, as Millennial and Gen Z employees comprise a larger portion of the retail workforce than other industries. 61% of survey respondents in retail said there would be a disruptive and reputational impact on their company if digital natives’ experience expectations weren’t met; they also claim that 73% of younger-generation employees would consider leaving the company if they didn’t have a seamless digital experience. Less than ideal, considering staff shortages are rife in the industry (39% agree)–and costly to your business.

Unified observability aids in keeping customers and staff–and keeping them happy–by monitoring the end-user experience. It collects data on application responsiveness, transaction times, and user interactions for everyone using your systems at each end, enabling retailers like you to identify and proactively address performance issues. This comprehensive visibility and data into your user journeys help retailers optimize their digital channels, enhance website and app performance, boost staff productivity and satisfaction, and ultimately provide an exceptional experience, no matter the end-user.

Optimizing IT infrastructure

The more technology, the more complexity. Maintaining a robust and agile IT infrastructure is vital for retailers to support their operations effectively–but managing a highly complex IT environment can be challenging, especially when it comes to identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks.

The Riverbed Unified Observability Platform offers a holistic approach to IT infrastructure monitoring. By analyzing the performance of network infrastructure, servers, and databases, it enables retailers to detect and diagnose issues in real-time, reducing outages and guaranteeing uninterrupted operations. This proactive monitoring and troubleshooting capability allows IT teams to resolve problems before they impact critical systems or disrupt the customer experience.

As the retail landscape continues to evolve, retailers must embrace innovative solutions to overcome challenges and stay competitive. By leveraging Riverbed’s monitoring and analytics capabilities, retailers can transform their businesses and thrive in the dynamic retail landscape of today and tomorrow. Get in touch with us today to learn more, view our retail infographic for more interesting DEX survey findings or visit our retail website page.

The role of Server Message Block (SMB) protocol

Server Message Block (SMB) protocol is a popular choice for network file-sharing, providing secure remote access to files, printers, and devices. However, the challenge arises when SMB encounters Wide Area Network (WAN) latency, which affects network and application performance. As organizations increasingly operate with decentralized workforces and diverse resources, optimizing file-sharing becomes paramount. This is where WAN acceleration becomes a key player to reduce latency, optimize bandwidth, and ultimately enhance employee productivity.

Why WAN acceleration for SMB protocol?

WAN acceleration involves technologies that enhance data transfer efficiency between centralized data centers and remote locations across a WAN. Common performance killers like network congestion and high latency can significantly impact application performance, leading to decreased productivity and revenue loss.

The challenge of SMB WAN acceleration

Despite the clear need for optimizing SMB traffic, many organizations face challenges due to the protocol’s security features, such as signing and encryption. Optimizing SMB traffic requires decrypting and re-encrypting data. Security rules and regulations often complicate this interaction, hindering deployment and impacting application performance.

Optimizing SMB traffic with Riverbed solutions

Riverbed Acceleration solutions offer a way forward for organizations seeking to optimize SMB traffic securely. Riverbed SteelHead, Client Accelerator, and Cloud Accelerator deliver faster and secure application performance across distributed enterprises:

• SteelHead: A vital component of Riverbed Acceleration solutions, SteelHead optimizes and accelerates network traffic and application performance, reducing bandwidth consumption by up to 99% and accelerating SMB traffic up to 40 times, even when signed or encrypted.
• Client Accelerator: Extending SteelHead’s capabilities to remote employees, Client Accelerator operates on end-user laptops, providing access to critical applications with speed and security, irrespective of location.
• Cloud Accelerator: Ensuring quick and secure delivery of workloads, Cloud Accelerator optimizes cloud-based file and workload transfers, accelerating migration, meeting SLAs for cloud backup, reducing data egress costs, and stabilizing cloud workload performance.

Riverbed’s SMB acceleration deployment models

To ensure full latency and bandwidth optimization, Riverbed offers three deployment models that cater to different security postures and IT structures:

• Model 1: SteelHead directly connected to Active Directory
  • Simple configuration with widget support for each appliance.
  • Supports both Kerberos and NTLM authentication.
• Model 2: Deploy the Riverbed WinSec Controller
  • Offers better security posture with a Tier 0 appliance.
  • Compliant with the Microsoft Enterprise Access Model.
  • Supports greater latency (up to 110 ms) between WinSec Controller and domain controller(s).
• Model 3: Domain Independent SteelHead Kerberos Only (DISKO)
  • Does not require SteelHead appliance to join the domain.
  • Exclusively supports Kerberos authentication.

Riverbed customers find success with SMB optimization

Riverbed WAN acceleration solutions employ advanced optimization techniques, including transport streamlining, data streamlining, and application streamlining to improve the performance of protocols and applications over WANs dramatically. These technical benefits translate into increased employee satisfaction, IT savings, and improved application performance.

Choose a best-in-class solution for optimizing SMB traffic

SMB traffic optimization is no longer an option but a necessity for modern distributed enterprises.

Riverbed provides a comprehensive solution, offering multiple deployment models based on security needs and helping organizations achieve faster SMB transfer speeds and significant data reduction. The benefits extend to increased employee satisfaction, reduced IT costs, and improved application performance.

Want to learn more about Riverbed’s WAN acceleration solutions for SMB optimization? Download our latest white paper.

Fortunately, there’s a supercharged solution to do just that: Digital Experience Management (DEM).

DEM isn’t just about making employees and customers happy. It’s also an absolute powerhouse when it comes to slashing costs and cranking up efficiency. Buckle up as we dive further into the wild world of DEM and its impact on businesses.

Wrapping Our Heads Around Digital Experience Management

First things first, let’s get a grip on what DEM is. Think of it like a secret weapon that makes digital interactions with customers and employees bloody brilliant. It’s about making the technology support the human at exactly the time the human needs it—and leaving everyone grinning from ear to ear.

The Dynamic Duo: Cost Reduction and Efficiency

When it comes to Getting Stuff Done in business, cost reduction and efficiency go hand in hand. Cost reduction is all about squeezing those expenses and making your finances happy, particularly when “Money’s too tight to mention.” Efficiency, on the other hand, is about getting stuff done with minimal time and resources. To conquer the business world, it’s imperative to find the sweet spot between these two bad boys.

DEM Saves the Day: Slashing Costs Like a Superhero

Now, here’s where DEM is the caped crusader who saves the day. By unleashing the power of DEM, businesses can optimize resources and cut down on operational expenses. How? By automating boring, repetitive tasks that eat up time and money.

And you know what? Those savings don’t have to go into the corporate coffers: they can be used to fund growth and innovation—and that can help improve the digital experience of customers and employees.

DEM Supercharges Efficiency: Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Hold onto your hats because DEM can rev up your efficiency like nobody’s business. With the right DEM tools and platforms, you can streamline your processes, eliminate those pesky bottlenecks, and get things done faster than a speeding bullet. Say goodbye to wasting time and hello to supercharged productivity. And guess what? DEM also promotes teamwork, communication, and lightning-fast data-based decision-making.

Unleashing the Full Power: Winning Strategies for DEM Domination

To make the most of DEM’s mind-blowing potential, you do need a game plan. Here are some tips to conquer the DEM game:

First, choose the right DEM tools that match your needs and goals:

• What business critical apps are the life blood of your business?
• Do you only need DEM for IT use cases?
• Are there roles for DEM to play outside of IT?
• What processes are the Kryptonite?

Like the perfect superhero suit, it’s got to fit right!

Second, don’t forget to keep tabs on how DEM is performing. Track those digital experience indexes and listen to what your users have to say. That way, you can keep fine-tuning your DEM strategies and creating value to conquer the digital universe.

Conclusion: Unleashing the Power for Global System Integrators and Channel Partners, Because Why Settle for Less?

We’ve journeyed through the wild world of Digital Experience Management (DEM), and now it’s time to talk about the glorious benefits that Global System Integrators (GSIs) and Channel Partners can reap when they deliver this mind-blowing outcome to their customers.

Hold onto your hats because this is going to be epic!

1. Rise Above the Rest: By including DEM as part of your arsenal, you can soar above the competition because you’ll become the go-to expert, guiding businesses towards jaw-dropping digital experiences. Who needs ordinary when you can be extraordinary?
2. Enduring Loyalty: When you deliver the power of DEM, you’ll become the heroes your customers need. The result? Unbreakable loyalty and a partnership that’s stronger than Vibranium.
3. Cash Flow Explosion: DEM opens a treasure chest of revenue opportunities. Businesses are hungry for DEM expertise, and those who deliver it become the masters of their domain, unlocking new consulting and cross-selling opportunities, not to mention long-term contracts. Cha-ching!
4. Superhero Squad: By embracing DEM, you can form unbeatable alliances with other vendors and providers, breaking down the traditional IT Silos to form a league of extraordinary IT superheroes.
5. Thought Leaders Unite: Take the spotlight and shine like the stars you are. With your DEM expertise, you can become the thought leaders in the industry. Share your wisdom, showcase your success stories, and guide others towards the path of DEM greatness. The world needs your insights, and you’re here to deliver!

However, when Colonel (Retired) Joseph Pishock assumed the role of Director of Networks and Services at USSOCOM in the summer of 2020, he encountered a starkly different reality. USSOCOM’s enterprise network, the fourth largest in the US Department of Defense, serving over 80,000 personnel spread across more than 20 time zones, was plagued by frequent interruptions. Basic services, like delivering emails to headquarters, were sluggish and unpredictable. The network’s performance suffered due to legacy systems and the disparate needs of its users. 

Why network visibility matters when it’s mission-critical 

What Colonel Pishock realized was that USSOCOM lacked the necessary visibility into its own network. IT faced the incredibly complex task of connecting personnel with data, devices, applications, and communications across non-classified, secret, and top-secret networks. However, without a clear understanding of network dependencies, boundaries, relationships, and authorities, troubleshooting became a time-consuming, reactionary process. Consequently, Colonel Pishock turned to Riverbed for a solution that could provide the unified observability required for mission success.

Together, USSOCOM and Riverbed built a command-and-control structure capable of delivering real-time updates to authorized personnel. Previously, leaders only received information on network performance from the previous day. Thanks to Riverbed’s involvement, USSOCOM now has full and immediate visibility. Personnel in the help desk now share the same insights as network engineers, enhancing collaboration and problem-solving.

Colonel Pishock shared his insights at the 2023 Military Communications and Information Systems (MilCIS) Conference and Expo in Canberra, Australia. Drawing from the success of Riverbed’s partnership with USSOCOM, he offered five tips for how technology companies should approach US Defense.

Five tips to achieve visibility for mission-critical defense  

1. Don’t get stuck on laptops and desktops–include mobility as well

When it comes to enterprise networks, it’s easy to make laptops and desktops the focus. But Colonel Pishock’s advice is to pay equal attention to mobility. Because it isn’t centrally managed, cell/mobile phones can be a point of vulnerability. Riverbed’s Aternity provides visibility into the end-user experience across desktops, laptops and mobility devices. With it, you can identify the cause of delays to the network, devices or an app’s back end to diagnose and fix issues impacting UX. This is critical to optimizing the productivity and aspects of command, who rely heavily on mobile devices. 

2. Partnerships with professional services are essential 

Perhaps the most difficult lesson learned was that government organizations, no matter how qualified, can’t handle everything internally. Initially USSOCOM wanted to create a bespoke solution to solve its network issues but became its own worst enemy. After embarking on a failed in-house deployment which delayed the project by six months, Colonel Pishock advocated for USSOCOM to partner with Riverbed professional services to tap into their network expertise. 

3. Government needs to take an active leadership role  

Breaking down the barriers to support professional services throughout implementation was a weekly occurrence. Rather than leave the project to the IT teams, uniformed and civilian government leaders and operators needed to take an active role. This was crucial in getting Riverbed’s solution into the hands of personnel who would actually use it. Training was tailored for different users—creators, doers, and watchers—because they all utilized the same tool for different purposes.

4. Orient everyone around a real problem and create a baseline to measure success 

To create a baseline for performance, Colonel Pishock said it is important to set up a vignette. For this project, he kept it simple. How long does it take from the time you put in your ID (CaC) card to achieve a functional Outlook? Internal teams had no idea what the start-up sequence was, or what systems talked to what. It exposed a lack of understanding of the dependencies and interdependencies within the SOCOM network. Working hand in glove with experts from Riverbed, Colonel Pishock was able to streamline, simplify and create a baseline (1 minute). The baseline changed every time a modification was made. Now, USSOCOM can actively monitor the network, make changes and proactive decisions to optimize performance. 

5. Ensure your solution integrates with existing cyber tools

Chances are, Defense already uses other technology solutions. Any technology company approaching Defense needs to find a way to integrate their solution with existing tools. Don’t create a situation where there is a complicated divestment decision to be made because Defense is often locked into multi-year agreements. The ideal solution can be integrated with existing systems, setting Defense up for divestment in the future, which is a more realistic goal.

Mission success depends on providing personnel with real-time data and insights to make fast, informed decisions. As the digital infrastructures that support defense grow in complexity, closed networks become barriers, rather than facilitators, of data flows.

Therefore, having clear visibility across these landscapes is not just important–it’s mission critical. Riverbed can help you monitor network needs and adapt in real time–supporting operational continuity and mission delivery. Find out more about what Riverbed Unified Observability portfolio can do for defense organizations today.

But there’s a bigger story here that should interest every IT decision maker: the imperative of observability is both a very real and complex problem to solve, and Cisco, like many others, are making attempts to solve it.

Why Cisco bought Splunk

Observability has its roots in the mid-20th century tracking of satellites, rockets, and aircraft. These new technologies were monitored via telemetry, the remote collection of data. As devices and networks have grown more and more complex, telemetry has become more sophisticated, and in the 1990s, the term “observability” began to be used to describe the data-driven measurement of an IT network’s state. Since then, the rise of cloud-based networks, mobility, and hybrid work patterns has seen its importance soar further still.

Splunk specializes in logging, security information, and event management (SIEM) and machine data analytics. It has carved out a significant market with customers, including Coca-Cola and Intel, as well as Cisco itself. The deal aims for Cisco to diversify away from its networking equipment business, which has been slowing. This year has seen Cisco make a key shift in its monitoring solutions by moving resources from AppDesign to ThousandEyes, and Splunk is an important acquisition for them. According to Cisco, the acquisition strengthens its security and observability capabilities, which are two of the most important areas for its customers.

What the deal means for observability

The deal comes at an exciting time for observability. In July, web analytics company New Relic was taken private in a $6 billion deal. Meanwhile, in September, Riverbed announced additions to their suite that enable users to track energy efficiency across networks.

Generative AI is going mainstream, and observers noted that Cisco’s acquisition announcement used the word AI a whopping eight times. Yet while the deal may be on-trend, how successful it is in the long run remains to be seen. The details have been approved by both boards, but there are still regulatory hurdles that need to be crossed. Perhaps a bigger problem is how Cisco manages the overlap between its products and sales channels – and whether that distraction impedes their ability to execute.

The future of observability

Other shifts in the industry continue. Alongside the rise of AI, thought leaders have a new favorite acronym. MELT (Metrics, Events, Logs, and Traces) sums up the resources that can be combined to give a holistic view of a digital ecosystem. Some experts are seeing traces beginning to overtake logs in importance. Grafana’s open-source eBPF solution enables the tracing of applications without instrumentation. Meanwhile, the OpenTelemetry (OTEL) framework is increasingly used across the industry and can enhance infrastructure, application, and end-user monitoring. At Riverbed, we believe all telemetry sources are important to see the full picture.

The future of observability arguably belongs to whoever can bring all these telemetry streams of data together best and present the results in a way that is consistent and shareable. While individual models have their uses, a mature unified observability solution offers a view of the entire digital ecosystem as one cohesive vehicle. Although many claim to do this, few actually do.

This is a specialty of Riverbed, whose observability suite has transformed the world’s largest organizations and how they deliver applications and services to both their customers and digital workforce. By bringing data together and using AI-powered automation, Riverbed IQ can aid problem-solving, empower decision-making, and keep users productive. It also supports NetProfiler, NetIM and Riverbed’s real-time digital experience management via Aternity. Riverbed’s open observability suite offers a richness that sets it apart from the rest.

“Oh my!” I hear you cry… that is a very boring topic. But let me make a radical argument: a journey through monitoring is a journey through the entire evolution of IT.

For decades—from the mainframe era to now—network monitoring has played a critical role in ensuring the smooth functioning and security of computer networks, adapting along the way to ever-increasing complexity and scale. And my own career matches this history.

Mainframes

I started work in 1988 as a trainee mainframe operator, the last of the breed. The traditional mainframe was near the end of its over 30-year run. Computer networks were centralized hub-and-spoke affairs, with a large mainframe at the centre.

Network monitoring primarily focused on system performance metrics and error detection within these limited-scale environments. We identified issues manually with basic monitoring tools such as system logs and rudimentary diagnostic utilities.

Client-Server

As my career advanced, I moved into client-server, with organizations deploying networks of interconnected servers and workstations. This architecture created a significant shift in network monitoring as it expanded to include traffic analysis, performance monitoring, and fault management. Simple network management protocol (SNMP) became widely adopted for gathering data from network devices. Administrators could now remotely monitor and manage network elements, paving the way for centralized monitoring solutions.

The Internet Revolution

In the mid-1990s, I moved out of internal support roles and into a client-facing mix of pre- and post-sales support. This coincided nicely with the explosion of the internet and vast interconnected networks. Monitoring solutions had to evolve to handle vast amounts of data and more diverse network topologies. We could monitor network traffic in real-time with network probes and packet sniffers, enabling administrators to identify potential bottlenecks, security threats, and anomalies.

Distributed and Virtualised environments

In the early 2000s, I took a job in the new area of WAN Optimisation, as “employee #1” in the company’s new UK offices, then moving into product management and strategy.  This coincided with the development of distributed, virtualised environments, which introduced yet another set of monitoring challenges. With dynamic and elastic infrastructures, traditional monitoring tools struggled. In response, we adopted more sophisticated solutions, such as network flow analysis, which provided insights into traffic patterns, bandwidth utilization, and application behaviour.

Cloud and Software Defined Networking (SDN)

As I moved through product management into strategy, another set of challenges arose as hosting, virtualisation and cloud computing coupled with the emergence of early software-defined WAN (SDWAN) and software-defined networking (SDN) challenged our network monitoring once again. In these environments, monitoring tools had to adapt to infrastructures lacking traditional physical boundaries. SDWAN and SDN allowed administrators to manage and configure network resources dynamically, necessitating monitoring solutions that could adapt to these new environments.

Big Data and Analytics

After a brief period working in Radio Access Networking and IoT, I was lured back to the wonderful world of Observability largely because the rise of big data and analytics had a profound impact on network monitoring. With networks generating enormous volumes of data, monitoring solutions now need to leverage machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence to identify patterns, detect anomalies, and predict potential issues proactively. Cross-silo data ingestion and real time analytics enable help-desk operators, support engineers and administrators to make fast, accurate, data-driven decisions, enhancing network performance and security.

Security-Centric Monitoring

There is one area in which, believe it or not, I’ve not been directly involved: as cyber threats become more sophisticated and pervasive, network monitoring has evolved to include intrusion detection systems (IDS), security information and event management (SIEM) platforms, and behaviour analytics to detect and mitigate potential security breaches.

It’s never boring

I continue to approach each day working in IT with a sense of wonder and amazement. IT is not “boring” or “run of the mill.” It is constantly changing, evolving, and improving, as we can see from the evolution of network monitoring, which has necessarily mirrored the rapid advancements in computer networking itself.

From basic performance monitoring in early centralized systems to complex analytics-driven Unified Observability solutions in today’s distributed and virtualized networks, network monitoring has become indispensable for ensuring network availability, performance optimization, and robust security. As networks continue to evolve, network monitoring will undoubtedly keep pace, leveraging emerging technologies to meet the ever-growing demands of the digital age.

End-user devices, in particular, require organizations’ attention when it comes to mitigating environmental impact: Gartner reports these devices constitute a majority of IT’s carbon footprint.

Poor device lifecycle management is a major contributor to that footprint. There are several preventative, proactive practices they can take to extend the current lifecycle of their devices—which optimizes their use and curbs their environmental impact. In fact, 83% of business leaders report that successful sustainability initiatives create significant short- and long-term value for their organization.

IT teams may worry making changes to their device lifecycle management processes can result in downtime, inefficiencies, and performance issues. However, robust device lifecycle management actually enables higher productivity and better performance by mitigating the waste of time, resources, and actual physical devices. Here’s how organizations can ramp up their device lifecycle management to improve their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes.

Reduce intake: conduct a comprehensive device inventory audit

Organizations can use existing inventory to minimize their contribution to e-waste and optimize their current resources. By conducting a comprehensive device inventory audit, IT leaders can gain the visibility they need into the devices they have, which helps prevent unnecessary device additions or performance-affecting device reductions.More specifically, an inventory audit can help leaders:

• Track lifecycle stages. Audits can catalog devices by their lifecycle stage, which purchase date, warranty status, and maintenance history all inform. This helps IT leaders gain a more accurate understanding of how usable or up-to-task each device is, which helps teams maximize their lifetime use. This can make the difference between throwing away a perfectly good device because it’s “old” or increasing an “old” device’s lifetime value, which preserves money and resources.
• Optimize device usage. Understanding device inventory allows organizations to assess device usage. IT leaders can easily reallocate underutilized devices, prevent unnecessary new purchases, extend the lifespan of existing assets, and reduce e-waste.
• Streamline device budgeting. When IT leaders know all the devices in their inventory, what they’re capable of, and where they are in their lifecycle, they can forecast future device needs with greater accuracy. This allows for better budget allocation and prevents overspending on unnecessary resources, which also reduces an organization’s carbon footprint.

Inventory audits also reframe corporate attitudes around older devices, and therefore, mitigate waste by extending their lifetime use. For starters, older devices are not necessarily useless devices. Based on Gartner’s research, while most organizations still set three to four-year refresh cycles for employee laptops, organizations have found that only a small fraction of those devices have performance metrics that would justify replacement within that time frame. Extending their life span represents millions of dollars in potential cost savings.

Repair and retain: Fix devices when you can

Organizations should err on the side of repair instead of throwing devices away. Unilaterally getting rid of devices when they get “too old,” even when they still have considerable lifetime use in them, wastes resources, IT support time (because IT teams need to replace them), and money. 

In fact, an overwhelming majority of older devices could have their lifetime use extended with simple repairs and maintenance. As such, IT leaders should institute priorities around:

• Hardware performance insights. IT leaders can utilize digital experience management (DEM) to optimize device lifecycle management. DEM can help organizations focus on actual device performance as opposed to a static calendar timeline, which helps extend device lifespan.
• Flexible life span policies. Treat each and every device as a unique circumstance. Organizations should avoid adopting singular life span policies that risk throwing away usable existing devices. IT leaders manage life span policies with DEM data that informs device performance.
• Employee-focused energy reduction. How an employee treats and maintains their devices is a major factor in device reliability. Organizations can mitigate device wear and tear by instituting policies around employee use, including battery preservation, power management settings, and sleep settings.

Restructure and recycle: Bake sustainability into device selection and procurement

Incorporating sustainability goals into procurement strategies can build a stronger foundation of device lifecycle management by uplifting environmental priorities from the beginning. IT leaders can incorporate sustainability into their procurement processes by:

• Seeking out vendors that ship devices in responsible packaging.
• Ensuring devices have specific ecolabel certifications, such as 80 PLUS, Energy Star, and EPEAT.
• Initiating tests to compare the energy efficiency of different device models.
• Sourcing devices from responsible providers with commitments to sustainability.

Organizations can also leverage third-party assistance to collect and evaluate data needed to assess their vendors’ ESG performance to ensure they’re meeting ESG goals. They should also ensure that their vendors are engaging supply chains with similar priorities around sustainability to enable multi-level reduction in e-waste.

Improving device lifecycle management from the ground up

Incorporating sustainability initiatives throughout device lifecycle management can be helpful in reducing e-waste and optimizing performance. 

Few strategies can match the impact of implementing an eco-conscious mindset from the very beginning of every device lifecycle. IT leaders with greater sustainability ambitions can take device lifecycle management to the next level by keeping sustainability top of mind during procurement, defining employee responsibilities for energy conservation, and, of course, gaining and maintaining visibility of all devices for better insights into their utilization. Those three strategies combined shrink carbon footprints and maximize ESG outcomes.

Find out how to make sustainable IT a reality by checking out our white paper, The Role of Unified Observability in Sustainable IT.

In this blog, we delve into the SEC T+1 rule, explore how Riverbed’s Network Observability solutions can help IT network teams in meeting the associated challenges, and provide guidance for current Riverbed customers to prepare for the SEC T+1 changes.

A quick summary of the SEC T+1 rule

SEC T+1 is a rule amendment that will shorten the settlement cycle for broker-dealer transactions in securities from two business days after the trade date to one. The SEC believes this will benefit investors and reduce risk in securities transactions.

There are other nuances of this rule amendment that address processes and record keeping requirements but for the network teams at financial services institutions, cutting the allotted time to settle a transaction in half will have the most impact.

Challenges for IT network teams

The new T+1 rule puts a lot of additional pressure on IT and network teams at financial services organizations to ensure their networks can handle the increased network demands and data processing that will come along with the shortened transaction processing window.

This means it’s critical that financial services organizations have broad and deep visibility into their network so they can proactively identify and quickly resolve network performance issues. This visibility is also crucial for adhering to T+1 requirements, answering questions like “how much traffic is being consumed?” and “how is traffic being prioritized?”

Riverbed NetProfiler and AppResponse can help address those challenges. Riverbed NetProfiler provides network flow analytics that can quickly diagnose network issues before they impact performance. Meanwhile, Riverbed AppResponse offers the robust network and application analytics needed to shorten the mean time to repair network issues.

NetProfiler and AppResponse customers

For existing Riverbed customers using Riverbed NetProfiler and AppResponse, it’s important to note that adapting to new SEC T+1 rule may lead to increased data generation and has the potential to stretch the limits of your NetProfiler and AppResponse capacity. To ensure your network observability and data retention, now is a good time to double check your existing licensed capacity and system storage.

Determining if NetProfiler is oversubscribed

You can determine your flow status by going to the NetProfiler or Flow Gateway ADMINISTRATION > System Information link at the top of the screen, and then clicking on SYSTEM. The video below provides an overview and you can read this blog, Determining If NetProfiler Is Oversubscribed, for more detail.

Checking AppResponse capacity

To understand how much additional packet and analysis horsepower remains in your appliance, head over to Administration > Traffic Diagnostics from the appliance webUI. This built-in insight is packed with critical charts of hardware and software components that power the packet capture and analysis capabilities. On the “General” tab, the bottom four charts will indicate if you have reached your AppResponse.

If you are seeing packet drops in any of these charts you should investigate how much traffic is being fed to the appliance by visiting “ADMINISTRATION” > “Capture Jobs/Interface” page. This page will list all the network capture hardware cards (or software/virtual interfaces) that are installed on the appliance along with their rated link speed.

Once you are familiar with all the capture cards installed and their link speeds, head back to the “Traffic Diagnostics” insight where the top two charts titled “Throughput” and “Packet Rate” will show how much traffic is going through the installed interfaces. Each interface must only be fed traffic below its line rate at all times. If in these charts (which go back seven days) show spikes in traffic which surpass the line rate for an interface, work with the infrastructure feeding traffic to AppResponse and ensure it spreads the load of packets across the other interfaces. In some cases, you may need to add another AppResponse to handle the peak rate of traffic.

The video below provides an overview of the process for both NetProfiler and AppResponse customers in detail:

While the SEC T+1 rule amendment will benefit investors and reduce risk in securities transactions, it comes with some challenges for network IT teams at financial services organizations. Network Observability solutions can help provide these teams with the in-depth network visibility needed to address these challenges by providing proactive identification of network performance issues and faster mean time to resolution. It’s critical that existing Riverbed customers evaluate their current usage levels to ensure they are prepared to handle the increased network demands from SEC T+1.

Learn more about how Riverbed can help financial services organizations.

Mildly annoyed, you finish your shop and head to the checkout. It takes you three more seconds than usual to grab that barcode and complete your transaction. No big deal, right?

Wrong. As you walk away, a queue of 10 customers forms behind you, each taking those three extra seconds swiping to their barcodes. That’s 30 seconds added to the cashier’s processing time. Multiply it by the 1,000 shoppers the store might see in an hour, and an entire 50 minutes is wasted.

At head office, the IT team’s high-fiving. The update’s rolled out, the interface looks fantastic, and everything’s running as planned. If only they knew what was going on for the employees and customers actually using their app.

And they could, had they implemented XLAs.

What are XLAs?

As their name suggests, experience-level agreements (XLAs, sometimes known as ELAs) are a variation of service-level agreements (SLAs) that focus on the end-user experience. Whether that end-user is your employees, your customers, or both, the way they engage with–and feel about–your solution is critical.

And XLAs aren’t simply an exercise in gathering sentiment. The most effective agreements combine the telemetry of your service with the feedback you receive on it and the emotional impact of it.

Essentially, you must ask yourself three questions: how reliable is my service? How well does it perform? And how do my users perceive it?

Why are XLAs important?

So, you’ve got performance management software, and you’ve set telemetry SLAs that are always met. Your IT team knows what it’s doing, and it makes sure your users can access the systems they need, when they need them. But does it know what’s going wrong once those users get into those systems, and what’s going right?

You obviously can’t ask every single employee and every individual customer how they’re feeling. Still, you can give them a platform for their thoughts–then combine this with your telemetry data to find trends, remedy issues, and make the people you serve happier and more productive.

This combination is key. Because if your employees consistently and collectively rate one of your systems negatively, you may assume it’s because it isn’t working to standard–when in reality, it’s just taking everyone too long or requiring too much effort to do what they need to get done.

It’s all about shifting your IT experts’ mindsets to journey-based services rather than services that perform their function and nothing more. It’s about considering the time it takes people to access the systems they need, how the platform looks and feels to use, and what behaviors users display.

It’s about having the data-based insight to make informed decisions on prioritizing investments, identifying skills gaps, and improving policies and processes. And it’s about adding the relevant shortcut if it takes 10,000 clicks to process an order.

How can I implement XLAs?

The good news is that there are digital experience, which can gather all the information you need– qualitative and quantitative–in one easy-to-find, simple-to-interpret dashboard.

Aternity’s sentiments capability goes beyond basic surveys, allowing you to use human-defined or department-agreed thresholds to establish what a positive end-user experience looks like for your business and your service at a granular level. For example, completing a process in three seconds might feel too slow for some users, too fast for others, and perfect for a few.

Not only can tools like Aternity flag specific issues like this, but they can also measure input across every stage of the delivery chain. Think telemetry data from your entire IT platform, feedback from your employees, sentiments from your customers, and everything in between.

So, you get a complete picture of how different elements perform in different scenarios throughout different journeys for different people–and what those people would ideally like you to do about it. And sometimes, it’s an action as small as moving your loyalty app’s barcode back to where it used to be.

In today’s increasingly digital, ever-demanding world, speedy response times and slick branding aren’t enough. To achieve your goals, stay competitive, keep your employees, and satisfy your customers, you need to transform and innovate. All based on authentic user experiences rather than IT’s assumed outcomes.

XLAs are one powerful metric that can empower you to do exactly that. Get in touch with us today and discover solutions that assess not just how well your systems are working, but how well they’re working for the people that matter.

AIOps combines big data and machine learning techniques to support IT operations functions. Its primary aim is to improve root cause analysis, enable predictive insights, and automate responses, all while significantly reducing mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) and elevating the digital experience.

EMA asserts that confidence in AIOps remains high, with nearly 92% of organizations believing AI/ML-driven network management can lead to better business outcomes. In fact, 40% of organizations have already integrated AI/ML technology into nearly all aspects of their network management processes.

Drivers of AIOps adoption

The top priority for using AI/ML is network optimization. Organizations are looking for ways they can tune the network to best meet specific business needs. What’s worth noting is that IT executives are increasingly placing their faith in AI/ML techniques to facilitate this critical endeavor. Additionally, other important use cases for larger organizations include automated troubleshooting, intelligent alerting and escalations, and predictive capacity management.

Top benefits of AIOps-driven networks

Most organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps to network management via their network management and network infrastructure solutions. Although domain-agnostic AIOps products such as Moogsoft and Big Panda exist, they are somewhat less prevalent in network management use cases.

AIOps offers significant advancements to monitoring the network. The biggest opportunity is network optimization. The network operates at its best when AI/ML identifies and correlates events in real-time, resulting in a smoother overall system. The report also indicates benefits in network agility, security, and resiliency.

Riverbed NetIM adds AI/ML techniques to improve results

With the addition of dynamic thresholding in Riverbed NetIM infrastructure monitoring, all Network Observability products support AI/ML techniques. NetIM now uses dynamic baselining that automatically and continuously updates historical performance baselines to identify significant changes in behavior. Instead of setting and tuning per device static thresholds for utilization, memory, and CPU, Riverbed NetIM dynamically baselines these metrics to identify significant changes in behavior. As a result, it significantly reduces “noise” stemming from non-actionable alerts and minimizes ongoing maintenance related to manual threshold tuning.

For a deeper dive into Riverbed NetIM IT infrastructure monitoring, click here. To explore the myriad of benefits and applications of AIOps, download our ebook today.

Immediately identify device hot spots 

The NetIM Health Sunburst automatically identifies infrastructure hot spots that are impacting network and application performance. It isolates data by country, region, and city or by sites. This level of visibility enables fast root cause analysis by supporting fast drill down into a list of worst performing devices.

The Sunburst color codes (orange, yellow, green) areas that need improvement, so you can act fast to make appropriate changes. It helps:

• Provide an immediate picture of overall infrastructure health and the factors that contribute to it to prioritize remediation efforts.
• Identify infrastructure hot spots with color-coded health scores to speed up problem investigation.
• Drill-down into problem area to identify poorly performing devices.

The new sunburst health visualization provides an easy alternative to the geographic heatmap and geo-topology visualization options.

How Health Sunburst works

A device’s geographic location data, which can be set in the Device Manager, is used to aggregate by Country, Region, and City. The size and color of the slices in the sunburst is based on the relative number of devices and worst device health, respectively. When you mouse-over a slice, you get a summary of the devices in the slice. Clicking on a slice provides the list of devices in the slice.

Alternatively, you can use device site membership and site hierarchy to aggregate and display health by site with the separate but related Site Health Sunburst visualization panel.

NetIM for comprehensive infrastructure monitoring

Riverbed NetIM is a holistic solution for discovering, mapping, monitoring, and troubleshooting your IT infrastructure. It captures infrastructure topology, detects performance and configuration changes, maps application paths over the network, diagrams your network in real-time, and helps troubleshoot infrastructure problems and plan for capacity changes.

NetIM is built on a modern, containerized architecture for scalability, ultra-high performance, and cloud deployment for operational agility. As an integrated component of the Riverbed NPM platform, customers can manage infrastructure issues in the context of overall  performance health.

For more information on Riverbed NetIM, click here.

Proactively measure boot times across the digital estate

Security updates are imperative, yet the forced reboots accompanying these patches are sometimes perceived by users as a significant hindrance to their daily productivity. Riverbed Aternity steps in with a dedicated boot time dashboard designed for troubleshooting. Prior to using the Riverbed Aternity boot time dashboards, slow boot and login times were only investigated when users noticed a decline in their individual boot and login times and reached out for assistance.

With Riverbed Aternity, you gain valuable insights into addressing slow boot times through “out of the box” dashboards. These empower you to accurately pinpoint the causes of delays, whether they stem from outdated drivers, burdensome startup tasks, or other underlying issues.

Deep dive into phases of the boot process

A standout feature of Riverbed Aternity is its ability to provide a detailed history of recent boots and logins for individual users. This feature is especially beneficial for Service Desk technicians, enabling them to analyze a user’s boot process in-depth. They can precisely identify the stage, from Power-On to the end of the login sequence, where the delay occurs. If necessary, tickets can be assigned to the correct resolver team.

With Riverbed Aternity, getting a handle on the entire boot-to-login process is a just a few clicks away. Dive deeper into the details of each phase of the boot process, identifying sluggish drivers, services, startup processes, or group policies. Determine which department has the worst average boot time or even which laptop model ensures the quickest user logins.

Aternity DXI: Identify boot problems quickly

All problems get worse at scale and in end-user device footprint spanning a few thousand devices, identifying boot problems calls for a dependable single metric, Aternity’s Digital Experience Index (DXI) offers a broader perspective by scoring the average boot time across all users in your environment. Compare this metric with the average boot times of other Aternity customers for a valuable benchmark. Such comparison is crucial, as it helps you understand the relative impact of boot and login times within your environment compared to others.

Learn more

With all of these available dashboards and troubleshooting workflows, make sure your IT teams are properly equipped to handle boot and login problems, regardless of the scale of your end-user device infrastructure. Learn more about this topic on Riverbed.com.

51% of Gen Z U.S. business students stated they’d accept less pay to work at an environmentally responsible company—which means companies would do well to invest in sustainable IT for the new workforce. Implementing workflow optimization and automation is the best way for organizations to achieve the workplace that the next generation demands by improving digital employee experience (DEX) and integrating sustainable IT practices into daily operations.

How sustainability provides workers with the digital employee experiences they crave

Even if they’re not outright saying it, the Millennial and Gen Z workforces crave a positive digital employee experience (DEX). Meeting sustainability expectations is critical to providing that positive digital employee experience for Millennials and Gen Z. According to Deloitte, 50% of Gen Z workers and 46% of Millennials are currently pushing their employer to drive change on environmental issues. 

Here are a few ways sustainable IT can enhance DEX:

• Improve engagement and morale. Gen Z and Millennial employees are a values-driven generation. When they feel that their values align with their organization’s, it can significantly increase overall engagement and morale. 
• Enable better workflows with efficient and reliable technology. Sustainable IT inherently aligns with adopting more modern, efficient technologies and processes. When workflows are optimized and automated to mitigate unnecessary repetitive tasks, it can significantly reduce the chances of frustration or burnout. 
• Enhance communication and collaboration. Sustainable IT practices promote the adoption of tools and platforms that help mitigate unnecessary and redundant human intervention, streamlining communication and fostering better teamwork.

The challenges of integrating sustainable IT practices

While integrating sustainable IT practices is necessary for organizations that hope to retain the next generation of talent, moving toward sustainability presents challenges that highly impact workflow productivity. These challenges include:

Data volume and velocity

Matillion and IDG found that organizations experience monthly data growth of 63% per month on average. More IT systems are connected to a single company than ever, creating a massive volume of data at high velocities. Managing and processing this data in real-time and manually without overwhelming teams and leading to performance bottlenecks is virtually impossible

Data consistency and quality

Organizations must often process data from diverse and disparate sources, which makes it difficult to standardize company-wide data aggregation, collection, and analysis. More likely than not, there will be inconsistent data formats, missing values, and errors seriously impacting the accuracy and integrity of any data collected—which then forces teams to sink time and energy into identifying and remediating mistakes.

Resource and expertise constraints

Data moves fast in modern digital ecosystems, so workers must move even faster. However, it can be challenging to build the infrastructure and expertise needed to aggregate data (which isn’t always accurate or high-quality) from disparate sources—and then mine that data for insights. While investing in certain tools, personnel, and training can help mitigate resource strain, companies with tighter budgets may still experience significant bottlenecks here. Additionally, more is not always better. Simply adding tools or solutions to a tech stack doesn’t necessarily guarantee greater productivity.

These issues all negatively impact a major value of Millennial and Gen Z workers: convenience. Our 2023 Global Digital Employee Experience Survey Report found that 68% of Millennial and Gen Z are likely to go elsewhere if their employer’s DEX, which includes convenience and ease of use, does not meet their standards.

How workflow optimization and automation can help sustainability and DEX

While balancing IT device performance and reducing environmental impact might seem like unrelated ideas, they are in fact deeply intertwined. These goals can functionally support each other when approached with this critical mindset: Sustainable IT is better IT. 

Here are a few places where workflow optimization and automation can help organizations meet sustainability goals and ideals:

Energy efficiency

IT workflow automation can help significantly optimize (i.e. reduce when it’s not necessary) energy usage. With the proper automation, teams can schedule maintenance tasks during off-peak hours or even turn off devices, lights, and other energy sources when they’re not in use or needed. Organizations can leverage AI to enable energy-efficient algorithms and other automated processes that reduce overall power consumption, shrinking their carbon footprint and lowering their operational costs.

Resource optimization

The right workflow optimization and automation strategies solve experience and resource gaps. Workflow optimization inherently involves streamlining processes by reducing unnecessary steps and mitigating the need for human intervention—which can also help eliminate bottlenecks. Optimization and automation are most efficiently applied here when they remove the need for humans to carry out repetitive tasks that machines could do. When organizations standardize these automation procedures, IT systems can utilize their existing resources more efficiently, thereby reducing waste and excess energy expenditure.

Automated data validation and real-time data cleansing

When organizations automate data validation, they can identify and rectify data discrepancies or anomalies with rigor and timeliness. This ensures higher data accuracy, significantly reducing unnecessary human intervention when vetting data for quality and relevance. Additionally, automated workflows can address real-time data cleansing and enrichment. This helps identify and rectify data inconsistencies with greater accuracy and speed, reducing the environmental impact of operational inefficiencies.

New generations, new expectations, new technology

Millennials are about to enter their prime earning years, while Gen Z prospects flood the workforce in droves. As both generations actively seek out organizations that meet their values (and are willing to leave those that don’t), companies will need to live up to expectations of sustainability.

Implementing workflow optimization and automation in the right instances can significantly reduce environmental impact by streamlining inefficient processes. With automation enabling sustainable IT practices, companies can eliminate unnecessary human intervention, creating a more positive, productive, and environmentally friendly environment for all generations of workers.

Want to learn more about the key to implementing sustainable IT? Check out our white paper, The Role of Unified Observability in Sustainable IT, to take a deeper dive.

So, what does sustainability mean for your FSI business, and how can you navigate the stringent environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals you’ve set? Riverbed Solutions Engineer, Jaspreet Sandhu, sheds light on this in our video on the topic: “Sustainability is all about balancing the needs of our people, planet, and profit to succeed both environmentally and financially.”

Sustainability is a top priority for businesses worldwide. A recent report by Forrester reveals that 51% of the Fortune Global 200 have set carbon-neutral or net-zero aims. Despite this commitment, many are struggling to get there, as data accuracy creates the biggest obstacle in ESG reporting.

To help overcome these hurdles, the suite from Riverbed empowers FSI organizations to:

• Satisfy stakeholders with exceptional digital experiences.
• Protect the planet with energy-saving functionality.
• Save money while aligning with stakeholder expectations.

Scaling hardware and software to cut e-waste (and cost)

With siloed systems and disparate data, it can be hard to get a full picture of what hardware and software are being used the most, least, and not at all within your FSI business. Industry-leading unified observability tools like the suite from Riverbed gather and correlate large amounts of granular data on machine and license usage from internal and external sources–everything from employee PCs to ATMs.

They then transform this into actionable insights and workflow automation to drive effective decision-making, allowing you to end licenses that aren’t needed and recycle or remove hardware nobody would miss. This can add up to an enormous saving in both physical and carbon footprint. After all, data centers alone account for almost 4% of the entire world’s energy usage (and no doubt cost you a fair amount to manage).

One success story comes from Tate & Lyle, realizing substantial savings by using Riverbed Aternity. By freeing up expensive, unused software licenses, the company can now allocate the correct number to its user community, delivering excellent return on investment.

Replacing machines based on performance, not time

If you have a policy of replacing hardware every two, three, four, or five years, the chances are you’re getting rid of machines that don’t need updating or upgrading yet–and dealing with lag and blue-screening from some that may be ready to retire earlier, leading to productivity losses and employee dissatisfaction. By deploying Riverbed , you can access up-to-the-minute insights and predictions on the performance of every single device in your fleet, displayed in easy-to-read dashboards–enabling you to replace hardware based on how much life it has left in it, rather than how long its life has been.

Riverbed Aternity allowed Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust’s IT team to make better-informed decisions about their investments in this way. “We have revised our asset refresh plan based on device performance,” says Darren Spinks, Head of IT Operations at the trust. “Aternity showed us we wouldn’t need to replace 42% of our 1784 devices aged five years or older. This has meant that we have already returned our investment in Riverbed Aternity.”

The UK team at Energy firm EDF uses Aternity in a similar way. Donna Lloyd, the company’s Senior Enterprise Manager of Platforms & Enablement, elaborates: “When we upgraded to Windows 10, we looked across our estate to see where our slowest machines were, so we could target those replacements first. When we replaced them, we used performance statistics to assess and demonstrate the positive impact.”

Resolving problems before they even begin

Another multifaceted benefit of using a platform like Riverbed is being able to proactively resolve issues, saving time, money, and a whole lot of stress.

Coming back to the Kent Community Health NHS Foundations Trust, the Aternity solution provides the organization with auto-remediation actions. These reduce service desk calls and automatically resolve IT-related problems–before users even become aware there’s an issue. What’s more, the IT team can monitor the power consumption of its endpoints and adjust energy usage accordingly to help reduce its carbon footprint. This supports the NHS’s sustainability agenda of becoming the world’s first net-zero carbon health service.

Reminding staff to power down from afar

One sneaky way energy peaks (and bills) can creep up on you is when staff spend time away from their PCs or laptops without shutting down. And one small-but-mighty way Riverbed can help is by monitoring device usage, then sending those employees alerts when it’s time to power off–for example, when they’re heading for lunch or winding down for the day. If they ignore these notifications, Riverbed can even allow you to shut their machines down remotely, so you can be a sustainability hero from afar.

Keeping a general eye on your carbon footprint

In conclusion, Riverbed has many features and functions that can help you improve sustainability by simply being more aware of what’s going on in your business, knowing what you can do about it, and having the power to take those steps.

The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust implemented Aternity with the aim of cutting costs and its carbon footprint. Not only is the organization projected to save £2.5 to £3 million over a five-year period–it’s also able to interrogate data more intelligently and see where general improvements can be made, leading to sustainability wins across the board.

Jeffrey Wood, Deputy Director of ICT at the trust, says, “We now have a single source of truth for clinician experience, improved application performance, reduced ICT spend and at the same time we have reduced our carbon footprint. Riverbed Aternity has exceeded my expectations on all fronts.”

We’ve specially collated a dedicated sustainability resource page for companies like yours, which you can visit here. Once you’ve explored it, get in touch with our team, and let’s talk about your FSI organization’s specific, unique ESG goals–as well as how we can empower you to meet and even exceed them.

It’s hardly news that AI is the hottest trend in the tech world. Most of us have dabbled with ChatGPT, become a designer for the day using Midjourney, or taken advantage of the many applications we hardly even consider artificial intelligence–from unlocking our phone with our face to performing a smart Google search.

But having just attended and exhibited at the Gartner IT Symposium in Barcelona, where there was a huge gathering of CIOs and IT executives, it’s clear that AI is revolutionizing the digital sphere in more ways than we could have imagined. And with that comes new opportunities and new risks. Here are some of the things we discovered about AI at the event.

AI is changing the game, and our everyday

If you’re familiar with Gartner, you’ll know about their Hype Cycle methodology. As it says on the Gartner website, ‘clients use Hype Cycles to get educated about the promise of an emerging technology within the context of their industry and individual appetite for risk.’ Gartner has curated several Hype Cycle iterations around AI, including generative AI: the technology that powers the likes of the aforementioned ChatGPT.

The organization’s research has shown four primary use cases for AI:

• Everyday Internal use in a company’s back office
• Everyday External use in the front office
• Game-changing External use, helping businesses become more forward-looking via innovative products and services
• Game-changing Internal use, supporting arduous regular activities and boosting core capabilities.

According to Gartner, it’s critical that companies start considering where they want to be as an organization–and, therefore, where they’d like to use AI. Because when you know the use case, or use cases, that would align with your business’s future strategy and goals, you can apply the technology more effectively and gain the biggest return on your investment.

At Riverbed, we use AI in our unified observability solutions across all four use cases. We provide our partners with scripted automation and proactive issue detection and remediation, both internally and externally, so they can have greater control and productivity in their everyday. And we offer customer and employee journey analysis, looking at behaviors and trends to drive innovation–including product releases–so they can change the game in their industry.

AI works best when you’re open

As well as AI, digital experience management (DEM) was named one of the top five areas organizations should be focusing on – and an area that AI can help accelerate and enhance. We’re an expert in this field, and as we’ve already touched upon, unified observability solutions like ours can empower companies to better understand their employees and customers, improving their experiences using data-driven insight instead of guesswork. But did you know Riverbed’s platforms are open, seamlessly integrating with any IT setup and infrastructure to complement and enhance–not replace–third-party tools a business has already deployed? Attendees who came to our stand at the Gartner Symposium were particularly impressed with this.

One visitor commented, “I’m procuring an APM solution right now. When I found out you could integrate with it, I felt relief that my decision won’t impact the results I can achieve with Riverbed.” Another added, “Riverbed can help me capitalize on and protect my investments, which is important to me and my business.” For us, offering an Open Suite means being able to leverage open APIs to collect or feed data and telemetry from/to third-party tools. This is achieved through the adept use of AI and ML capabilities, resulting in actionable insights. By integrating emerging technologies and tools, we provide our clients with the reliability, resilience, remediation, and more necessary to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers.

AI is creating regulatory conundrums

Imagine a world where you can open a bank account, claim benefits, secure a new job, or access healthcare at the swipe of a screen. Or how about a future where you go to buy an item of clothing online, and the company already knows all your measurements, so every garment you purchase is crafted to be a perfect fit? While this may sound futuristic, fun, and functional–removing the prospect of the tedious returns process–it’s terrifying to consider how much data would need to be gathered, stored, and shared about you for this to happen.

For this reason, the government will need to play a major role in operational excellence, citizen engagement, and driving outcomes. The government will need to regulate the use of AI and will have to play major roles in Identity Use Cases: Identity for Compliance, Identity for Personalization, Identity for Fraud Detection and more. Double down on some of the use cases, they must facilitate confidentiality and compliance for people to feel confident engaging with these new ways of living and working. To that point, behavioral and customer analytics solutions–like the ones Riverbed can provide will add extreme value in better understanding and benchmarking User Behaviors, Journey, Sentiment and Experience. Ultimately, we’re about to see the birth of a new era of AI data culture and security, and we’re ready for it.

AI is only as good as what it’s given (for now)

While AI is already starting to help us in our daily lives, you only have to give Midjourney or DALL·E 3 a few prompts to see that they’re not foolproof (why do the hands always look so strange?). There are many reasons these models aren’t quite clever enough to outsmart us yet – and one of those is that, for now, the tech is only as intelligent as the information it’s given.

That’s where reinforcement learning through human feedback (RLHF) comes in. The RLHF approach involves creating a machine-learning model and continuing to educate it by asking for human input. This could mean, for example, getting people to score an AI chatbot’s response using various criteria. How funny was the chatbot? How natural sounding? How informative?

The ‘reinforcement learning’ (RL) part means AI agents are trained on reward and punishment mechanisms. So, they’re rewarded for correct moves, punished for wrong ones, and therefore incentivized to hit the mark every single time.

Then, onto the ‘human feedback’ bit. This is where real-life annotators compare various outputs from the AI agent and pick those they prefer–essentially, responses that are closer to the intended goal. By combining the elements of traditional RL and plenty of input from us, AI will evolve, eventually completing tasks with perfect performance.

AI is all about the human-machine relationship

It’s a tale that’s been told in endless sci-fi movies for countless years: humans want to be more like computers, while computers want to be more human. In truth, it’s the relationship between mortal and machine we need to get right so we can both progress. Soon, for example, there’ll be a machine-customer market, where robots can purchase consumables for themselves so they can operate for us to the best of their ability. It’s vital that CIOs own these new relationships, having awareness and influence over AI-ready principles, data, and security.

At Riverbed, we like to keep things interactive–so on our stand at Gartner Symposium, we hosted two games, our own branded Pac-Man game and golf putting. One customer, while playing golf and scoring well, commented that they’d never even been on a ‘green’. They then joked that in the future, they’d likely be able to download software to their brain and learn everything they needed to achieve like this in any new sport.

But was this statement a joke, or could it be an accurate prediction?API If Gartner’s insights are anything to go by, we could be looking at the latter.

To learn more about how Riverbed’s solutions use AI to proactively predict and remedy issues, build useful shortcuts, save companies time and money, and give customers the experiences they’ve come to expect, chat to us today.

Retailers like you need to follow the 90% planning to accelerate digital experience adoption and implementation, seeking out advanced tools that provide real-time insights, enable proactive monitoring, and empower data-driven decision-making. Especially when preparing for a busier Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Singles Day, where you’ll undoubtedly see traffic explode.

In simple terms, this means implementing unified observability solutions: the tools that give you a complete picture of every process, system, and level of the technology stack in simple-to-read, easy-to-understand dashboards. Ninety-two percent of retail survey respondents agree there must be greater investment in unified observability solutions that provide actionable insights for better employee and customer digital experiences.

This is where Riverbed’s unified observability product suite can help. Here’s five of many ways in which it can:

Support real-time performance monitoring

Customer expectations have never been higher–and your competitors have never been in easier reach. That’s why it’s more important than ever that your digital infrastructure performs flawlessly, delivering the exceptional digital experiences consumers demand.

Riverbed provides real-time performance monitoring, enabling retailers to promptly track and optimize their systems. One organization using Riverbed improved page load time by 30%, leading to a 32% rise in customer engagement (that is, the number of customers completing transactions).

Enhance customer satisfaction

It’s impossible to meet customers where they are without… well, knowing where they are. Gaining a deep insight into customer interactions and behaviour allows you to see what shoppers want, need and value the most; where things are going right; and where experiences could be improved.

By analyzing user journey data, optimizing website flows, and personalizing experiences, retailers can meet and exceed customer expectations, leading to improved brand loyalty and higher customer retention rates. In fact, our retail customers have experienced up to a 30% increase in customer satisfaction scores.

Reduce mean time to repair

There’s little more that’s frustrating or costly than downtime and performance issues. But having intelligent monitoring capabilities enables proactive issue detection and resolution. Don’t just take it from us either, the Head of IT Operations at our customer Halkbank said: “With automated alerts, mean time to resolution is almost at zero. We can see an anomaly as it happens and resolve it before it impacts service. This actionable insight ensures optimum performance and a great customer experience.”

By proactively identifying and addressing performance bottlenecks, retailers can maximize revenue opportunities and provide uninterrupted service to their customers–moving from reactive to proactive problem-solving.

Optimize store operations

Your success depends on the efficiency of your store, both online and in your brick-and-mortar branches. Research shows that in 2023, the omni-channel retail experience is in high demand, especially as holiday shoppers skate between sites, apps, and physical stores to purchase gifts and goodies. This has made IT more complex for retailers as they scramble to provide the same premier service across every touchpoint. But unified observability can make things simpler and smoother; 98% of retail leaders agree it’s important (58% say critically important) to stay competitive and deliver seamless user experiences.

Riverbed helps retailers monitor and optimize various aspects of operations, including point-of-sale (POS) systems, inventory management, and employee productivity. This allows retailers to enhance the overall shopping experience and drive profitability while boosting employee satisfaction and freeing up staff members’ time to work on more strategic tasks or complete training. This would be particularly useful, given that 39% of retail survey leaders believe they’re understaffed, while 38% have enough employees but not enough with the key skills to do their jobs.

Empower data-driven decision-making

Data-driven decision-making is a competitive advantage in the retail industry. Riverbed equips retailers with powerful analytics, user journey data and reporting features, so they can make informed decisions, optimize business strategies, and stay ahead of the competition.

In an anonymous, impartial Gartner Peer Spot review, one of our customers told us: “Riverbed enables us to see exactly what users see as they engage with applications. So rather than the user complaining, we get to know in advance and will see what the hiccups are. We can correlate the user experience. It makes troubleshooting easy.”

In short, Riverbed’s unified observability product suite is a game-changer for the retail industry, equipping businesses with the tools to transform their performance and drive success. Offering real-time performance monitoring, enhanced customer satisfaction, proactive issue resolution, optimized store operations, and data-driven decision-making, it truly revolutionizes how retailers operate.

Get in touch with our team today, and let’s chat about how Riverbed can empower the experience for your retail business.

In our 2023 Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey, which polled 1,800 global IT and business decision-makers across 10 countries and seven industries, we found that 98% of FSI leaders agreed that delivering an exceptional DEX is essential to remain competitive, with 62% describing it as ‘critically important.’

With a continuous influx of data from various sources, from online banking and ATMs to call centers and retail branches, and data scattered across siloed systems, it’s impossible to manually monitor each transaction and identify issues (or successes). Not to mention, this manual data review also incurs significant costs, both in terms of money and productivity.

Matters are made even harder when long-standing employees leave or retire, taking years or sometimes decades of knowledge with them. The Millennial and Gen Z workers filling their roles won’t stand for inefficient processes or outdated tech, either; they are digital natives accustomed to using the best tools for the job. Failure to meet their expectations may result in a costly and time-consuming hiring loop and a significant skills shortage.

But don’t just take it from us–the FSI leaders we surveyed believe 69% of employees would consider leaving the company if adequate DEX was not provided, and 68% say failing to meet digital expectations would disrupt operations, affecting reputation, productivity, and organizational performance. Plus, if you’re anything like the 84% of FSI decision-makers we surveyed who’ve acknowledged the increasing relevance of IT within the C-suite, you’ve undoubtedly taken a more prominent role in the boardroom over the last few years. This has been accelerated as the pandemic has pushed the world towards hybrid working, and tech and data have started to be seen as a strategic driver. With these challenges, the responsibility falls on IT leaders to answer to the broader business.

This is where unified observability solutions come into play: intelligent tools that can liberate you from the complexities of your infrastructure, reduce risk, enhance your reputation, cut costs, and retain your most valuable talent. Unified observability is already considered essential in the industry; 94% of FSI leaders in our survey believe that greater investment in unified observability solutions, providing actionable insights for better employee and customer digital experiences, is necessary. Riverbed’s Unified Observability product suite is differentiated and unique in the industry.

Here’s how you can use this technology to empower exceptional digital experiences for everyone across every touchpoint:

Diagnose problems in the customer journey

It can be tough to look forward when you’re constantly fighting fires. This is something that one of Turkey’s largest and longest-established banks, Halkbank, was all too familiar with. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and customers began using more digital channels overnight, the organization’s mobile banking platform needed to scale to handle more than double the volume of traffic–growing from one million mobile customers to 2.5 million in a short timeframe.

“If mobile banking went down for even a few hours, customers wouldn’t be able to access their accounts or process transactions,” explains Namık Kemal Uçkan, Head of IT Operations at Halkbank. “Our goal is to provide 100% availability for all services, so we need a solution that helps us be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to network management.”

Today, the bank uses Riverbed’s Network Observability solution to monitor critical services across its network and data center through Riverbed Portal, which consolidates and displays data in user-friendly dashboards. It identifies any performance issues across over 40 business-critical applications, before these impact end-users.

Examine user trends

As well as proactively pointing out problems, powerful unified observability solutions like Riverbed’s will examine trends like transaction types and patterns, seek out lengthy processes employees or customers are having to follow, and create shortcuts automatically. So, not only can everyone enjoy the peace of mind that your systems will always work, but they can also rest assured that they’ll work in the quickest, easiest and most logical way, saving them time and you money.

What’s more, having visibility of these trends allows you to work more strategically and make smarter decisions, driven by data–knowing which areas of the business to invest more in and which to scale back, without the usual associated risk. As a simple example, if fewer customers in a certain locale are using ATMs and more are opting to head into a branch, you can remove underused machines and divert their maintenance costs to hiring more in-store staff or offering additional in-person services.

This doesn’t just apply to hardware, either. Riverbed’s unified observability tools provide a unique perspective on users’ actual application usage. That means you can find underutilized licenses and software and reclaim or uninstall where you see fit, saving a considerable amount of IT costs in the process.

Meet compliance regulations

By troubleshooting poorly performing transactions and flagging potential anomalies, Riverbed’s Unified Observability portfolio will allow you to meet increasingly stringent compliance regulations. They’ll also crawl for suspicious web activity, keeping your people safe while they surf.

This is another feature Halkbank put into action, as Uçkan explains, “We were excited to use new features such as SSL certificate monitoring to help keep data secure when browsing the web.”

Identify the slowest machines in your fleet

In our recent research, 88% of FSI leaders say slow-running systems and applications, plus outdated technology, are directly impacting the growth and performance of their organization. Yet often, in businesses of all kinds, hardware is replaced based on how long it’s been in operation rather than by how well it’s working. ATMs are no exception, and neither are the many machines you no doubt use at head office.

The best unified observability solutions will analyze your physical tech’s speed and efficiency, including transaction performance, so you can update and replace where it’s truly needed. This cuts waste and gives employees and customers a consistent and reliable experience. The same principle applies where software is concerned. Riverbed’s Aternity Digital Experience Management solutions can cost-justify and measure the impact of strategic IT projects like cloud mobility and data-center transformation, along with routine changes like OS and application upgrades.

In conclusion, if you’re looking to optimize your hybrid infrastructure while ensuring fast, agile and secure delivery of any application, over any network, to users anywhere, explore our website to learn more about Riverbed’s Unified Observability product suite.

However, the path to implementing sustainable IT is fraught with challenges, and one of the most pressing is the issue of data collection. In this blog, let’s delve into the complexities of data collection in the context of sustainable IT and introduce a compelling solution: Unified observability, bolstered by Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM).

The data collection dilemma

Effective data collection is the linchpin of sustainable IT solutions. Data empowers informed decision-making by providing insights into resource consumption and environmental impact. Also, it facilitates benchmarking, identifies optimization opportunities, and ensures the efficient allocation of resources for impactful sustainability initiatives. Additionally, organizations can leverage data to promote transparency, behavioral change, and compliance while enabling continuous improvement in the pursuit of greener IT practices.

Without robust data collection, the path to sustainable IT would lack direction and the means to measure and enhance environmental impact. However, collecting data is challenging for several reasons, including:

• Data fragmentation: Data spread out across an array of platforms complicates the process of consolidating data into a unified and coherent format.
• Compatibility issues: Cloud-based and on-premises systems often use different technologies and standards, making collection hard.
• Data security and privacy concerns: Different data sources may have varying levels of security measures and privacy regulations, complicating collection.
• Data volume and velocity: Managing and processing large amounts of data in real time can overwhelm infrastructure and lead to performance bottlenecks.
• Data consistency and quality: Data from diverse sources may not always adhere to the same standards of consistency and quality.
• Resource and expertise constraints: Building the infrastructure and expertise needed to aggregate data from various sources can be resource-intensive.
• Scalability: Scalability challenges emerge when trying to accommodate the growing number of data sources and the increasing volume of data they generate.
• Vendor lock-in: Vendor-specific data formats and APIs can make it difficult to extract data for aggregation or to switch to alternative solutions, limiting flexibility.

Unified observability to the rescue

Unified observability is a game-changing solution to the challenge of data collection. It offers a comprehensive and real-time perspective on IT systems, facilitating informed decision-making regarding environmental impact. Here’s how it works:

• Comprehensive data foundation: Unified observability platforms meticulously collect granular, timestamped, and complete records of every event across the IT infrastructure. This data forms the bedrock for accurate decision models tied to sustainable IT initiatives.
• Actionable insights: These platforms deliver user-centric, actionable insights with relevant context to the right stakeholders, enabling organizations to identify areas with the most significant impact potential.
• Intelligent automation: Unified observability platforms leverage AIOps to provide expert decision-making and automation, resolving issues proactively before they escalate into incidents. This streamlines sustainable IT initiatives, enhancing operational efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint.

Practical applications of unified observability for sustainable IT

Unified observability isn’t just a theoretical concept; it yields tangible benefits for sustainable IT initiatives. The solution promotes energy efficiency by delivering granular insights into applications and infrastructure interaction. This empowers businesses to pinpoint inefficiencies, redundancies, and areas of over-provisioning. Also, real-time data analysis informs decisions about workload consolidation and virtualization, leading to reduced energy consumption.

The key to leveraging unified observability to drive sustainable IT lies within DEM platforms. Such solutions examine performance data and user feedback so organizations can gauge the environmental impact of routine tasks, establish sustainability benchmarks, and inspire employees to participate in sustainability initiatives.

Enhancing sustainable IT with Aternity DEM and prebuilt energy efficiency dashboards

Riverbed Unified Observability includes a mighty sidekick in the form of Digital Experience—a digital experience management solution that aggregates insights based on application and device performance data, human reactions, and benchmarking across industry peers.

Aternity DEM now features an energy efficiency dashboard that offers valuable insights by gathering and correlating detailed telemetry data from various devices. This dashboard provides a clear view of device uptime and energy-related metrics, enabling IT teams to pinpoint areas where avoidable energy consumption can be reduced. Additionally, it allows for the measurement of carbon footprint at both individual and organizational levels. By measuring uptime, IT organizations can identify opportunities to educate employees about conserving energy during idle device times.

Key features include:

• Computation of essential environmental metrics such as device uptime, electricity usage, carbon emissions, and electricity expenses.
• Granular breakdown of metrics by device usage duration, geographical location, power plan, business unit, and more.
• The flexibility to customize calculation parameters to align with specific objectives and operational requirements. This customization empowers organizations to leverage Aternity as a robust tool for embracing and advancing sustainable IT practices.

Drive positive environmental impact

Aternity DEM is at the forefront of driving positive environmental change. With its real-time insights powered by unified observability, Aternity helps organizations overcome data collection challenges to promote more energy-efficient operations. As a result, we see that sustainable IT isn’t just good for the environment, it’s good for business. Check out our white paper, The Role of Unified Observability in Sustainable IT, to take a deeper dive.

To achieve this, we engaged in enlightening conversations with IT leaders from businesses spanning countless industries. Whether they were energetic start-ups or established multi-million-dollar enterprises, what struck us most was that their fundamental challenges and priorities were the same.

With that in mind, these are our top five takeaways from the event, shedding light on the key insights and trends that emerged:

1. End-user experience is key

When your competitors are just a click away, the one thing that’ll universally, unequivocally set you apart – and drive true business and revenue growth–is the end-user experience. By that, we don’t simply mean the customer experience, but that of your employees, too. After all, keeping staff is just as important and valuable as building brand loyalty and advocacy externally.

However, it can be difficult to see the full picture of how satisfied your workforce and customer base are when you don’t have insight into their everyday experiences, pain points, and journeys. Sure, you can analyze small data samples to see how things are going, but that’s hardly representative. Sending out surveys to gauge sentiment isn’t the most productive move, either; by the time you’ve gathered feedback, it’s too late, and people have already made up their minds about you and your services.

2. Throwing money at it just won’t work

A common approach to overcoming this obstacle is making enormous investment in the latest and greatest tech. But even with the most modern, state-of-the-art architecture and the highest bandwidth, the end-user experience can still be subpar. The performance of your applications lies less in their response times, and more in how you define and build the ecosystem that drives them.

That encompasses all levels of the tech stack–and requires you to think about everything from your users, network and infrastructure to your database, storage, and UI. More complexity means more likelihood of failure, and if you can’t pinpoint where that failure’s happening, you can’t fix it. This lack of insight is not only detrimental to your customer experience, but it also creates security and compliance risk, as you can’t see where potential breaches or anomalies are occurring.

3. No two businesses are alike

Sadly, you can’t fix these problems with an off-the-shelf product. Even though your organization may be running the exact same infrastructure and applications as others, your end-user experience–and the behavior of your apps–can be north and south. This is because your workflow and business logic will always be different, and this is no doubt the area on which you spend the majority of your time.

The Covid pandemic has only created more disparity in how companies operate, accelerating the uptake of hybrid working and forcing more IT teams to move their architecture to the cloud. While every business faces the same challenge in empowering their people to work effectively and efficiently from wherever, whenever, the level at which this is possible and encouraged–and the tech and tools that need to be made remotely available–varies massively.

4. The simpler the solution, the better

Things become even more convoluted when the majority of today’s businesses–from huge corporations to small enterprises–have more than five different tools doing either the same job, or with overlapping features. For instance, they may have network traffic monitoring solutions and network devices analyzing things separately, or app and server monitoring platforms working in tandem (but not necessarily together).

With no unification, correlation, or communication between any of these tools, time and investment are wasted, and employees are plagued with alert fatigue as endless notifications pop up and ping. Plus, in the boardroom, when questions are asked–like, “What’s the cause of that issue?”, “Where’s it happening?”, “What’s it impacting?” and “Is just one service or network affected, or all of them?”–leaders can’t give a comprehensive answer.

These silos are brilliant for covering individual teams, or team players, but not for protecting the company’s reputation or revenue. Or leaders from the scrutiny of the wider business.

5. Unified Observability can give you the edge

So, organizations are looking for a simple, connected solution that’ll help them proactively resolve performance issues by providing state-of-the-art monitoring, end-to-end visibility, and intelligent analysis for their critical services across all tiers. That means unified observability–and the smartest of these solutions use AI and machine learning, not just to identify issues but to solve them proactively and automatically.

This includes solutions from Riverbed, which are completely scalable and uniquely tailored to each organization. Riverbed’s tools have been specifically designed to provide the optimum end-user experience by finding and remedying problems at their very root, throughout the entire tech stack–before hardware and software are even rolled out, updated, or upgraded. No more symptomatic alerts creating hassle and headaches.

Moreover, these solutions provide data-driven insight that allows you to look forward and work strategically instead of purely fighting fires. For example, they can find trends and patterns in the end-user journey to create shortcuts that make everyone’s lives easier or assess where machines or licenses are going unused to drive cost efficiencies.

See you next year!

We enjoyed every moment of our week at GITEX. It was a privilege engaging with the leading companies in the region and helping them understand how IT can eliminate data silos and alert fatigue, improve decision-making, and deliver seamless, secure digital experiences with Riverbed. If you missed it, here is a look back at our week:

Thanks to everyone who stopped by our booth. If you’d like to connect with our team, book your free, no-obligation one-to-one demo with one of our experts today. We look forward to hearing from you—and seeing you at GITEX 2024.

However, maintaining a robust and secure infrastructure is no small feat. With the increasing complexity of networks and the ever-evolving threat landscape, organizations are turning to monitoring solutions–like Riverbed Unified Observability from Riverbed–to ensure their IT suite runs smoothly and securely.

And while we pride Riverbed on being a comprehensive with an intuitive user interface, empowering IT teams and making their jobs simpler, it’s easy to miss out on the full potential of the powerful portfolio. That’s where Riverbed Professional Services comes in.

Why choose a network monitoring system?

Network monitoring solutions are critical tools that allow organizations to gain real-time insights into the performance, availability, and security of their network infrastructure. These solutions collect data from various network devices–such as routers, switches, firewalls, and servers–and provide administrators with a holistic view of network health.

Monitoring solutions can be used to:

• Proactively detect issues, identifying and addressing problems before they impact productivity or cause downtime
• Improve security, scouring networks for anomalies to prevent breaches and unauthorized access
• Optimize resources based on real-time data, leading to better overall performance
• Analyze historical data, which can be valuable for trend analysis and capacity planning
• Meet regulatory compliance requirements by providing detailed reports on network activity

Why add Professional Services?

Deploying any network monitoring solution, including Riverbed Unified Observability, involves several complex tasks. These include hardware and software installation, deploying virtual instances, configuration, integration with existing network infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance.

Riverbed is also highly personalized to each organization’s unique setup and needs. So, certain elements need to be tinkered with and tailored to boost their output and effects. All of this can be tricky without the relevant in-house resource–and for so many businesses, their only internal IT support comes in the form of security staff, engineers, and a help desk.

Luckily, Riverbed Professional Services is here to help. The service sees our experts work in collaboration with customers, exploring their pain points and current architecture before deploying the necessary solutions in a way that works for them, solves their biggest challenges, drives valuable digital transformation, and provides tangible return on investment moving forward.

Professional Services encompasses a wide range of activities that are crucial for the optimum deployment of any Riverbed solution, including Riverbed Unified Observability, Riverbed Network Observability, and Riverbed WAN Optimization. These activities comprise:

• Assessment and planning: Our Professional Services professionals start by assessing an organization’s network environment, goals, and specific monitoring needs. They then create a tailored deployment plan to meet these objectives.
• Hardware and software selection: Choosing the right hardware and software network monitoring components is critical for the success of any monitoring solution. Our network pros can evaluate and recommend the best-fit options for the organization, based on specific requirements and budget.
• Installation and configuration: Once monitoring components are selected, our consultants handle the installation and configuration of the solution, ensuring it integrates seamlessly with existing infrastructure.
• Customization: Every organization has unique monitoring needs. Our experts can customize the solution to monitor specific devices, protocols, and performance metrics.
• Integration: In many cases, monitoring solutions must integrate with other elements–like ticketing systems and security information and event management (SIEM) platforms. Our consultants ensure smooth integration to minimize downtime and maximize value.
• Training and knowledge transfer: Proper training is essential to empower in-house IT teams to use their monitoring solution effectively. Professional Services provides training and hosts knowledge transfer sessions to ensure the organization can get the best out of its network, today and tomorrow.
• Ongoing support and maintenance: Finally, our experts offer ongoing support and maintenance services, including updates, patches, and troubleshooting assistance. They also help organizations adapt the Riverbed monitoring solution to their evolving network needs.

Maximize your investment with Riverbed Professional Services

A global logistics company deployed Riverbed Network Observability to monitor business-critical applications and services, troubleshoot performance bottlenecks across the company, and gain end-to-end visibility across its IT environment. The organization opted to use Riverbed Professional Services, and is seeing the benefit. Five years ago, 20% of its revenue was digital; now, it’s over 90%. As the company continues on its digital journey, having a scalable and reliable network infrastructure is critical.

In conclusion, network monitoring solutions, like those delivered by Riverbed, are indispensable for modern organizations seeking to maintain a stable and secure network. But deploying and customizing these solutions requires a deep understanding of network architecture and the specific needs of the organization. By engaging Professional Services, organizations can ensure their monitoring solutions are tailored to their unique requirements and deployed effectively–proactively managing their networks, enhancing security, and optimizing performance. This ultimately leads to increased efficiency and competitiveness in the digital landscape, so it’s well worth the investment.

The Riverbed portfolio is constantly being developed and improved to support the latest network security standards and provide visibility into today’s rapidly evolving, complex IT environments. With the help of Professional Services, it can take your organization even further–fast and fuss-free. Visit our website to learn more.

RiverbedUnified Observability portfolio is ready to tackle the energy efficiency and sustainability demands of modern businesses. With its focus on Sustainable IT, the Riverbed portfolio aims to support energy-conscious practices and meet the energy reporting requirements worldwide.

Sustainability consciousness is on the rise

In an era of heightened environmental consciousness, corporations face increasing pressure to decrease their carbon footprint and adhere to sustainability regulations like the European Green Deal and the international Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol.

In early September 2023, the state of California introduced landmark legislation, SB 253, which mandates environmentally conscious disclosure obligations for thousands of U.S. public and private companies. The EU had already announced similar requirements as part of their CSR Directive in early January 2023.

With growing adoption of these disclosure laws worldwide, Riverbed Aternity’s Sustainable IT dashboards have been developed with flexible configuration and customization to be adaptable to local needs. Watch this video to see how Aternity provides your IT teams with the full suite of tools to tackle Sustainable IT requirements and practices:

How Riverbed Aternity’s energy efficiency solution helps

Aternity equips your IT teams with a comprehensive suite of tools to address Sustainable IT requirements and best practices. This includes out-of-the-box dashboards that compile essential energy data, automation workflows, built-in surveys, and notifications for end-users.

Riverbed Aternity has introduced a new “Sustainability” category of dashboards, with regular additions of new  “Sustainability” dashboards as they become available.

Now, let’s explore an example “Energy Efficiency” dashboard of a company with a global workforce, including remote employees. This dashboard vividly illustrates how seemingly innocuous power settings on Windows laptops can significantly impact power consumption across the board. It also provides a clear understanding of the nuanced details of the energy demands of user equipment.

Looking at all the user devices in this company collectively, it’s apparent that around 46% of the time in a month, the devices consume power despite users not actively interacting with them. Aternity refers to this time as “Inactive.”

Let’s delve into how this 46% “Inactive” time was calculated:

An hour of uptime is considered “Inactive” when no keystrokes or mouse movements are detected by Aternity, and the screen or monitor is either in sleep mode or locked while consuming full power. However, if there is any keyboard or mouse activity, that hour counts as “Active.” As the calculation of idle time is very conservative, there could easily be a lot more power wastage occurring.  In some tools, the “Inactive” time is also called “Idle Time.”

Optimize energy conservation with Balanced Power Plan

Looking into the details of Windows devices, especially those using the “Balanced Power Plan,” a Windows out-of-the-box setting for reducing power consumption, it’s evident that collectively, almost 53% of the time, these devices remain idle while still consuming power. In fact, the percentage of time these devices were “Inactive” is even higher for devices using the “Balanced Power Plan.”

In summary, “Inactive” time closely relates to what would traditionally be perceived as “Idle Time” for these end-user devices. Fine-tuning the device power plans could result in saving kilowatt-hours of electricity by suspending or shutting them down when they are “Inactive.” However, are they genuinely doing nothing?

Collect information with Sentiment Surveys 

There may be legitimate cases where long idle times are expected.

Aternity’s Sentiment Surveys are seamlessly integrated into the product, offering an effective way to survey a selective group of users or the entire digital estate from within the product. These surveys help administrators combine survey data with energy efficiency, Sustainable IT data, or performance data collected by Aternity to provide a comprehensive view of which areas of their digital estate need attention. Aternity offers a range of out-of-the-box survey templates, and users can also create their own from scratch.

These sentiment survey templates raise awareness, understand employee behavior, and drive cultural change.

Take action with remediation scripts

Once insights are gleaned from Aternity dashboards, Aternity provides remediation scripts and end-user notifications to implement configuration changes, such as updating the Windows registry or customizing a device power plan. Aternity also informs end-users of this activity through notifications. There are various out-of-the-box remediation scripts available, and administrators can create custom scripts from scratch if needed.

Learn more

Riverbed recognizes the growing need for sustainability in IT worldwide. Riverbed Aternity empowers customers to achieve their sustainability goals by offering curated energy-focused dashboards and user-conscious workflows, including automated remediation, to take control of energy expenditure. To learn more about how Riverbed can assist with Sustainable IT, please visit Riverbed’s Sustainable IT page.

Portfolio Review: What it means to succeed

FITARA grades agencies on their performance across seven areas tied to how they buy and manage their IT. One of these areas is Portfolio Review—also known as PortfolioStat—which assesses how well agencies are reviewing their IT portfolios to save costs, increase efficiency, and reduce waste and duplication. As part of their review, agencies must also demonstrate how their IT investments align with their mission and business functions.

An agency’s PortfolioStat grade is based on its ratio of IT cost savings to total IT budget over the last three years. The higher the ratio, the higher the grade—but FITARA also scores on a curve, so that the eight agencies with the highest ratios receive A’s, the next six receive B’s, and so on. This means that to raise your grade, you not only need to do better than before—you also need to keep pace with other high-performing agencies.

Whatever your most recent grade, there are steps you can take now to make measurable progress by the next scorecard—and equip your agency for continuous improvement.

Top 3 ways to raise your PortfolioStat score

 1. Know what you have

Before you can make decisions about your IT environment, you need to understand everything that’s in it—end users, endpoint devices, applications, tools, network devices, etc..

Many organizations have massive environments, and getting an accurate inventory is no small task. To do this, you need firm, quantifiable data. If you rely on assumptions, estimates, or anecdotal information, you’ll never discover things you didn’t know you had. And if you try to conduct your audit manually, it will be daunting, time-consuming and not necessarily exact.

But with the right system recording every component in the environment, agencies can audit at speed and with high accuracy. Not only will this inform your long-term planning, but it can also help you make immediate improvements. For example, you could quickly identify duplicate technologies, devices over a certain age, or devices with low usage. This will make it easier to eliminate tools you don’t need and instantly eliminate costs.

Riverbed Unified Observability solutions can help your agency do this by providing fast, full visibility to your entire environment. It allows you to quickly discover and document every asset in your IT environment – from infrastructure to applications. This gives you the quantifiable data you need to make timely, effective decisions with zero blind spots.

2. Know who’s using it and how often

Once you know the assets you have and where they are, you need to understand their usage. Specifically, which ones are being used, how many people are using them, and how frequently.

This is key to rationalizing your investments and determining whether they align with your mission; if it’s not being used, it doesn’t align with your mission. These insights also help you identify potential wasted costs by spotlighting investments that are either underutilized or not serving a purpose, or if multiple tools are being used to achieve the same thing.

IT  Asset Cost Reduction can help you measure the utility of every asset in your portfolio. We have the unique capability to see traffic across the entire environment—allowing you to understand which resources are being used, by whom, and how often. From there, you can quickly identify assets that are redundant or unnecessary, which ones could be better utilized, and even which ones are delivering the most value.

3. Know how it’s performing

Next, you need to understand the health and performance of your network, apps, and endpoints. This will help you save costs and improve the end-user experience by enabling you to fix what needs to be fixed and replace only what needs to be replaced.

This means identifying the true root cause of an issue so you can take informed action to solve it instead of wasting time and money on the wrong solution. For example, if UX is poor due to slowness, you need to know if that slowness stems from the network, an application, the device, or possibly even a multi-factor situation. Without solid performance data, an organization may spend money on replacing a device or wasting time implementing a fix that only partially addressed the issue because   the real cause was actually something else. But with end-to-end performance monitoring, you know exactly which component needs attention and how it may be impacting other parts of your infrastructure.

You should also validate the performance of your existing assets to avoid arbitrary replacements. Every replacement decision you make should rely on performance data—not perceptions or assumptions. For example, don’t assume a device needs to be replaced solely because of its age. An agency may have a policy to replace devices every five years; but if those devices are working fine, and you can gain quantifiable data showing them to be healthy there’s no need to invest in new ones and significant cost can be deferred.

Riverbed can help your agency monitor and measure performance of every component in your infrastructure—allowing you to make cost-effective decisions and solve issues faster. Unlike other tools, we cover the entire infrastructure with one platform. Others may require multiple point solutions to monitor the individual pieces of your environment—delivering disparate data for network, applications, and devices that you’d have to correlate on your own. Meanwhile, Riverbed captures and correlates all performance data from all domains and puts it into context. This gives you a complete, current picture of performance end-to-end, so you can quickly identify root causes and effects.

Unlike its competitors, Riverbed uses full-fidelity data with no sampling. When other tools sample, by definition, they’re not collecting all the data. But Riverbed captures all packets and all data flows to provide the most granular and accurate insights possible.

Remember, you can’t improve if you don’t know your starting point

To make and demonstrate improvement, you need current, complete and quantifiable data to  understand your current IT landscape. This will give you an accurate starting point, so that every decision is informed, and every outcome is measurable.

Riverbed supports precision-guided IT service delivery, and we can help you establish that starting benchmark. From there, we can help you gain insights you need to make the most informed decisions about which assets to keep, consolidate, replace, remove or invest in.

Outcomes should drive investment

Consider the goals of FITARA in general and the goals of Portfolio Stat specifically: cost savings and avoidance, efficiency, compliance, and clear alignment with the mission. With these in mind, let the data tell you where to invest—and invest only in what will help you achieve these outcomes.

Riverbed uniquely supports all those outcomes in a single suite of product—allowing your agency to achieve compliance at least cost. Whether your agency is already using Riverbed or you have yet to experience its benefits, we welcome the opportunity to help you leverage its capabilities to their full potential to add near-immediate value to your portfolio review.

Want to increase your score? Contact us to learn more!

In the current landscape, delivering an excellent digital employee experience (DEX) is more important than ever. DEX plays a critical role in an organization’s day-to-day operations, and enterprises must invest in this area as a key business strategy. In fact, outdated technology, a driving factor of poor DEX, is costing American organizations over a trillion dollars in lost productivity.

While the case for improving an organization’s DEX is clear, it’s often an uphill battle. Digital infrastructures and tech stacks are more complex with hybrid workforces, combinations of cloud and on-prem services, and a mix of modern and legacy technology. Companies must also navigate the higher digital expectations of the next generation workforce. This shift has essentially led to chief information officers (CIOs) playing a key role in talent management and retention too, a reflection of the growing importance of IT departments in business innovation.

In the Riverbed Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey 2023, Riverbed polled over 1,800 global IT and business decision-makers to better understand generational expectations for the digital experience and obstacles and strategies in delivering an outstanding DEX. Let’s examine the key findings:

Digital experience expectations are higher for Millennials and Gen Z

The DEX survey found that 91% of decision-makers believe they’ll need to provide more advanced digital experiences to meet the needs of younger employees, and 89% say younger employees place increased pressure on IT resources. Failure to meet the DEX needs of younger generations can result in business disruption or reputation damage according to 63% of those surveyed. Additionally, leaders say that if digital experience demands of Millennial and Gen Z employees are not met, 68% would consider leaving a company.

Delivering a better digital experience is getting harder

Almost unanimously, 95% of surveyed decision-makers identified at least one major obstacle to delivering a seamless DEX. While no two companies are the same, the survey results revealed that most companies are struggling with five common issues:

• Budget constraints—36% 
• Talent shortages—35% 
• Inadequate observability tools—29% 
• Lack of suitable cloud services and SaaS applications—29% 
• Too much data—28% 

There is an interesting intersection in these issues. We found that 86% of survey respondents believe unified observability tools and automation can help bridge their skills gap. However, many decision-makers identified inadequate observability tools and budget constraints as obstacles. This could indicate that companies need to find a way to optimize their investments and prioritize initiatives that significantly impact DEX, like adopting more comprehensive unified observability solutions.

IT is pushing business innovation forward

Increasingly, organizations are acknowledging the importance of consulting with their IT departments; over 80% of ITDMs surveyed said they have a seat at their organization’s C-suite table. Much of this move to center IT departments can be traced back to the COVID-19 pandemic when organizations shifting to hybrid work modes quickly realized how critical the IT perspective is in day-to-day business decisions and the ongoing development of strategy.

Companies increasingly relying upon the skills and expertise of their IT departments coincides with a greater investment in technology. We found that 88% of respondents plan to invest in technology over the next 12-18 months to support the hybrid workforce. Ninety-six percent of leaders believe that doing so will help support their organizations’ ability to recruit and retain talent, and remain competitive.

Unified observability is crucial to DEX

Throughout the Global DEX Survey, respondents consistently noted the importance of end-to-end visibility and unified observability in their digital infrastructure. A significant 94% of IT and business leaders acknowledged that unified observability is essential to their company’s ability to stay competitive and deliver DEX. And 86% of leaders agreed that not having unified visibility over their digital employee experience was one of the greatest risks to their organization’s ability to grow and maintain talent and customers.

Investment in emerging technologies is business critical

In addition to the important role of unified observability, the survey found that 45% of leaders believe that artificial intelligence (AI), followed closely by cloud (43%), automation (35%), digital experience management (35%), and application acceleration (33%) will play a critical role in enhancing their business operations in the next 18 months.

Investing in these technologies can provide crucial support to DEX and digitizing processes, streamlining workflows, and improving efficiency — helping organizations “shift left” and save time, money, and effort.

Data tells a story

When it comes to DEX, it’s important to keep track of trends and changes across organizations. After all, when companies fail to invest in providing a hassle-free digital experience, it’s often a death knell for their business. It’s crucial for IT and business leaders to understand the common challenges affecting decision-makers to spark conversations in their organizations (and beyond) and improve the global digital employee experience. One final encouraging point the survey uncovered – 92% of leaders say investing in DEX is among their top priorities over the next five years.

Want to learn more about the Riverbed Global DEX Survey 2023 and what it tells us about the current state and future of digital employee experience? Access the full report and infographic here.

At Riverbed, we often talk about “you can’t protect what you can’t see.” Having the ability to monitor everything that is happening in your network is the first step in improving the security, performance and reliability of your environment. But how you capture, interpret and respond to that sea of data that from your network allows you to truly take control of your operational environment. This is where real-time network analytics comes in to play.

Fortunately, both exploits have been classified with a severity rating of “Medium” by Intel and AMD. The risk only becomes significant if an attacker manages to execute a piece of code on the vulnerable computer. This can happen, for example, through malware. Once executed, this code can read sensitive information, such as passwords, from the compromised device.

How many computers are affected in my organization?

The challenge when that happens for corporate administrators and security officers is to figure out exactly what this means and how many computers in your organization are affected. This becomes especially crucial as both Intel and AMD are already rolling out firmware updates to address the security gap. Prompt installation of these updates is paramount.

Organizations using observability solutions like Riverbed now have a powerful tool to gain insights into the vulnerability landscape. In the example shown below, I leveraged data from the desktops/laptops to automatically create a list of affected devices. To achieve this, I configured Riverbed Aternity to retrieve and evaluate additional information such as CPUID and MCU (for Intel) from the CPUs. In practical terms, you only need to import a Custom Device Attribute Monitor into the configuration of Aternity and access the corresponding dashboard. The advantage here is that the CPU data can seamlessly analyzed alongside existing observability data.

At a glance, it’s evident that 60% of the devices are undeniably affected by the security vulnerability, while an additional 17% require manual inspection due to undetermined firmware versions, yet the CPUs are classified as “affected.”

Plan and monitor your next steps

Some hardware vendors, like Lenovo, already released BIOS or firmware updates to to mitigate this risk. For instance, Lenovo provided an update (Version 1.54) for the ThinkPad T14s Gen 2i. However, here’s where the challenge arises. IT organizations must plan, execute, and validate the successful deployment of these updates. Many companies rely on automatic updates facilitated by hardware manufacturer tools, but the visibility into their effectiveness or user permissions isn’t always clear. This is where observability data becomes invaluable.

In our example above, we have 16 Lenovo T14s Gen 2i devices, with only one device having the necessary BIOS version to address the vulnerability, while the others have various versions. With this information, the IT department now knows that 15 devices require prompt updates. To facilitate this, the Riverbed Aternity Remediation Action can be employed.

Observability data can switch on the lights

If you already use Riverbed Aternity, look for the CPU Vulnerability Analysis Dashboard in the Aternity SE Dashboard Library or reach out to your Riverbed technical contact. Installation of the Custom Attribute Monitor is essential, and you’ll need a free Custom Attribute within your environment. Further details can be found in the Description page of the Dashboard. In the examples above, we utilized data from desktops and laptops, but observability data can also be sourced from servers in your data center, enabling similar analyses for your server landscape.

If you would like to learn more about Riverbed, visit our site, and existing users may log in to access the Riverbed Knowledge Base here. Visit these pages for further readings on the Intel Advisory, INTEL-SA-00828, and the AMD Advisory, Return Address Security Bulletin.

Network fault management

Network fault monitoring typically involves the deployment of monitoring tools that collect data from network devices in real-time. These tools often use techniques such as SNMP, WMI, streaming telemetry, ping tests, flow analysis, and log analysis to monitor network health and identify faults.

When a fault or anomaly is detected, the monitoring system generates alerts or notifications to network administrators or operators. These alerts provide information about the nature of the fault, its severity, and its potential impact on the network. Network administrators can then take appropriate actions to diagnose and resolve the issue, ensuring the network operates optimally.

Fault management is a critical aspect of network and systems administration that focuses on detecting, diagnosing, and resolving various types of faults or issues that may arise within a system, network, or application. The key capabilities of fault management include:

1. Fault Detection and Isolation: The ability to identify deviations from expected behaviors or conditions, then determining the scope and impact of a fault. This involves monitoring various parameters, metrics, and performance indicators to detect anomalies, errors, or failures.
2. Root cause Analysis: Identifying the underlying cause of a fault. This involves analyzing metrics and logs to determine the sequence of events that led to the fault and pinpointing the specific component or process responsible.
3. Alert Generation: Generating alarms, alerts, or notifications when a fault is detected. These alerts can be in the form of emails, text messages, dashboard indicators, or other notifications to inform administrators or users about the presence of a fault.
4. Reporting and Analytics: Generating reports and insights on the frequency, duration, and types of faults that occur. This information can be used for trend analysis, capacity planning, etc.

Configuration management

Network configuration management is the process of monitoring, maintaining, and organizing the information pertaining to your organization’s network devices. It is responsible for the setup and maintenance of network devices along with the installed firmware and software.

The primary goal of configuration management is to confirm that the system’s components work together seamlessly, facilitate efficient, reliable deployment and maintenance processes, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. Configuration management allows you to quickly configure and replace the functionality of a network device after a failure. If you don’t have a recent backup of that device, you’ll be starting over from scratch to configure new devices.

Key characteristics of configuration management include:

1. Network device discovery and diagramming: Having an accurate account of your network inventory and its status is critical to network configuration management. The first step is to map the network elements, including physical, logical, and virtual components, to create a high-definition network diagram. These automated network diagrams highlight new and modified devices, as well as devices with configuration errors.
2. Configuration backup: Configuration backup is the process of extracting configuration settings from a device and storing it to disk. The configuration restore process uses backup configuration data files for the system to restore a specific system configuration, whether on that same device or similar devices.
3. Configuration change management: Obviously, your network change management solution must be designed to keep track of any changes anyone makes to your devices or systems. This is crucial to avoid any errors or unauthorized changes that might bring about unfavorable consequences. It also speeds the troubleshooting process immensely by automatically comparing before and after configurations and highlighting differences.
4. Policy compliance and reporting: Network configuration management helps ensure compliance with regulatory, organizational, and security policies, like FISMA, SOX, HIPAA, PCI, NIST 800-53, SAFE, or DISA STIG. Out-of-the box templates make sure devices and systems are configured correctly to conform to organizational and regulatory policies. Leverage fully customizable rules to validate against a “gold-standard” configuration.

In short, configuration management promotes consistency, helps in identifying and resolving issues more efficiently, and ultimately leads to more stable and reliable systems. Additionally, configuration management can play a crucial role in handling complex configurations and managing dependencies between different components.

Network performance management

Network Observability consists of tools that leverage a combination of data sources to provide a holistic view of how networks are performing. Data sources include network device-generated traffic data (like network flows), raw network packets, and network device health metrics and events.

Network performance management tools provide diagnostic workflows and forensic data to identify the root causes of performance degradations — increasingly through the adoption of advanced technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning algorithms (ML). Based on network-derived performance data, NPM tools provide insight into the quality of the end-user experience.

NPM use cases provide the ability to monitor, diagnose and generate alerts for dynamic end-to-end network service delivery as it relates to digital experience. Key capabilities of network performance management include:

1. Monitoring: NPM involves continuous and real-time monitoring of various network parameters such as bandwidth utilization, latency, and packet loss.
2. Analysis: After gathering data through monitoring, NPM tools analyze the collected information to identify trends, patterns, and potential performance bottlenecks. This analysis, which typically leverages AI and machine learning, helps IT Operations teams understand the current state of the network and identify areas that need improvement.
3. Troubleshooting: When issues arise, NPM allows IT to quickly diagnose and troubleshoot problems. This includes identifying the root causes of performance degradation, locating faulty devices or configurations, and resolving performance bottlenecks.
4. Reporting: NPM tools generate comprehensive reports and dashboards that provide insights into network performance over time. These reports help in tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), identifying recurring issues, and measuring the effectiveness of performance improvement measures.
5. Capacity Planning: NPM involves planning for future network requirements based on historical performance data. By predicting future demands, organizations can allocate resources more efficiently and avoid unexpected performance issues.
6. Security: Network performance management can also supplement network security since poor network performance can be a sign of security breaches or cyberattacks. NPM tools typically include security monitoring features to detect anomalies and potential threats as they cross the network.

In summary, network performance management is a crucial aspect of maintaining a healthy and responsive network infrastructure, ensuring that organizations can meet the demands of their users and applications while maximizing the efficiency of their network resources.

Network security forensics

Network security forensics centers on the discovery and retrieval of information about cyberthreats within a networked environment. Common forensic activities include the capture, recording and analysis of events that occurred on a network to establish the impact and source of cyberattacks.

Investigators use network forensics to examine network traffic data that are involved or suspected of being involved in cyberattack. Security experts will also look for data that points in the direction of data exfiltration, outbound communication with blacklisted IPS, internal reconnaissance, etc. With the help of network forensics, security experts can track down all communications and establish timelines based on network data captured by the network monitoring solutions.

The main objectives of network security are to:

1. Prevent unauthorized access: Network security measures are designed to prevent unauthorized individuals or entities from gaining access to sensitive data, systems, and resources. This includes protecting against external attackers as well as unauthorized internal users.
2. Protect data integrity and confidentiality: Network security ensures that data remains unaltered and trustworthy during transmission and storage. It prevents unauthorized users from accessing or modifying data in transit or at rest.
3. Maintain network availability: Ensuring network availability is essential for maintaining business operations. Network security measures aim to minimize the risk of disruptions and downtime caused by cyberattacks.

Riverbed supports four types of network management

Riverbed offers a complete and integrated portfolio of network management solutions:

• Riverbed NetIM provides fault and configuration management. It leverages SNMP, WMI, streaming telemetry, CLI, synthetic testing, IP SLA metrics, syslog, and traps to monitor and troubleshoot network infrastructure health, availability, and performance. Use NetIM to detect performance issues, map application network paths, diagram your network, identify configuration changes, plan for capacity needs, and troubleshoot infrastructure problems.
• Riverbed NetProfiler provides enterprise-wide network flow monitoring. It supports a wide range of flow types and is used for monitoring bandwidth consumption, top talkers, and network utilization. It also supports discover and dependency mapping, capacity planning, and security forensics.
• Riverbed AppResponse provides real-time packet capture and analysis. In addition to monitoring round trip time, network errors, and bandwidth, AppResponse can also analyze more than 2500 business applications, including web transactions, SQL databases and VoIP and video application performance. Packet capture is also critical to network security forensics.

To learn more about Riverbed’s network management capabilities, please click here.

This produced a hurdle for users of Riverbed SteelHeads who join domains via Riverbed’s Active Directory Integrated Mode (Windows 2008 and later). One of the solutions researched by Riverbed was to modify the SteelHead’s userAccountControl value to represent with a small subset of attributes used by a Domain Controller, but without enabling any Domain Controlling functions from Riverbed SteelHeads after joined to the domain.

For a detailed technical insights, please refer to this technical brief.

To see for yourself, simply head to your browser and enter the web address of your favorite site, starting the URL with ‘http’ instead of the safer ‘https’. Chances are, it’ll appear ‘untrustworthy’, and you’ll be denied access.

Managing and overseeing network traffic and status are critical aspects of maintaining the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of a company’s computer systems. However, perhaps slightly ironically, it’s difficult to monitor network activity with encryption and other high-level security measures in place.

Essentially, in protecting your network, you’re shutting out not just cybercriminals, but your own well-meaning employees. So, how can you allow the right people to detect threats, breaches, and anomalies without giving access to the wrong ones?

Familiar security challenges organizations face

There are several different security barriers you may be up against. Here are some that might feel familiar:

Your protection is too good

With the widespread use of encryption protocols, monitoring network traffic becomes arduous. Encrypted traffic obscures content and makes it difficult to inspect for potential threats. And while encryption enhances privacy and data protection, it can hinder network security monitoring efforts.

Your network is too overwhelming

Meanwhile, networks have become increasingly complex with the growth of cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and distributed systems. Managing and monitoring them–across multiple platforms, protocols, and endpoints–is tough.

The volume and variety of network traffic you receive won’t help things, either. Handling and analyzing a vast amount of diverse data, including emails, web browsing, file transfers, and multimedia content–all in real-time–can be overwhelming. It requires robust monitoring solutions and capable hardware infrastructure.

Your threats are too sophisticated

When searching for security solutions, it’s important to know what you’re up against. But what about when you don’t? Enter Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs): sophisticated and stealthy attacks designed to infiltrate a network and remain undetected for an extended period. These attacks often employ evasion techniques that bypass traditional network security measures and escape detection by standard monitoring systems.

You’ll also likely have vulnerabilities that are unknown to you and your software providers and, therefore, lack a patch or fix. These are called zero-day exploits, and cybercriminals can abuse them to compromise your network. Monitoring for zero-day exploits is hard, as you won’t be aware they’re there.

Your monitoring system is too unreliable

Network monitoring systems generate alerts and notifications based on predefined rules and patterns. But these systems are prone to false positives (incorrectly flagging benign activities as malicious) and false negatives (failing to identify actual threats). Striking a balance between accurate detection and minimizing false alarms is crucial but problematic.

Monitoring network traffic for insider threats, where authorized users misuse their privileges or intentionally compromise the network, can be troublesome, too. Identifying anomalous behavior and distinguishing between legitimate and malicious activities requires advanced behavioral analysis and user monitoring techniques.

Your regulations are too stringent

As you’ll be painfully aware, it’s vital you comply with various industry-specific regulations and legal requirements, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) if you operate in Europe or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Monitoring network traffic while ensuring compliance can be tricky, requiring careful handling of sensitive data and maintaining appropriate audit logs.

A better solution for staying on top of network health

To overcome these obstacles, you’ll probably have deployed a combination of network security standards, such as:

• Firewalls
• Intrusion detection and prevention systems
• Secure network protocols
• Encryption mechanisms
• Advanced monitoring solutions

Plus, you no doubt enforce your security best practices, conduct regular security audits, and stay up to date with emerging threats and vulnerabilities. If so, you’re doing a great job–these elements are essential for maintaining network security.

But now, there’s an even easier way to stay on top of your network’s health without the headache. Riverbed Unified Observability tools are empowering organizations across the globe to maintain the visibility of their network traffic and monitor network infrastructure. No compromising network security standards, and no introducing potential risk to the customer environment.

Real-world impact of Riverbed

International engineers and project management company, Artelia Group, transformed its cyber security using the solution. Franck Martel-Badinga, Head of Infrastructure & Telecoms, explained, “Cybersecurity is a challenge for all organizations globally. We have over 7,000 employees and plan to reach 10,000 by 2025. As a result, we’re experiencing an increased number of attacks that are becoming more targeted and complex.”

To deliver a seamless and secure digital journey for employees and end customers, Artelia wanted to centrally monitor the end-user experience, servers, applications, and the network–even when teams worked remotely. The business had security tools, firewalls, and antivirus and malware software. Still, a talented hacker knows how to easily sidestep the radar of traditional tools to gain access to systems, apps, or networks.

So, Artelia needed to monitor the normal behavior of its network and systems to create a baseline. For example, an endpoint contacting 100 servers in two minutes is clearly abnormal, but antivirus software on a PC wouldn’t flag this kind of behavior.

Martel-Badinga concludes: “The Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Management and Riverbed NetProfiler solutions provide us with visibility into all data across our networks, apps, and end-users, giving us invaluable actionable insights for the business. It enables us to make even better decisions to continuously improve the digital experience for end-users and our overall business performance.”

A global biopharmaceutical innovator deployed the Riverbed suite to improve its security team’s agility and forensic recall capabilities. It did this by providing an automated process to preserve packet-based evidence associated with security events and they needed support for further security investigation. The solution boosts the AppResponse ROI for the tools team, allowing staff to satisfy additional stakeholders by extending packet retention time without having to invest in additional storage units.

Ready to learn more?

The Riverbed portfolio is constantly being developed and improved to support the latest network security standards and provide visibility into today’s rapidly evolving, complex IT environments. In fact, some might say it’s just too valuable to miss. Schedule a demo today, or visit Riverbed’s website to learn more

The good news: today, thanks to Digital Experience, there’s no need to compromise. Riverbed Aternity is a Digital Experience Management solution that:

• Measures and analyzes what’s going on with your IT suite–at a granular level, according to your unique setup and needs.
• Facilitates non-invasive remote operation, intelligent automation, and self-healing–so you can focus on what really matters.
• Provides detailed, data-driven insight and analysis–empowering you to make informed decisions.
• Shows genuine, meaningful in-year savings–while making life easier for every single user.

Here are five ways you can use Riverbed Aternity to keep everyone working seamlessly and cut costs, and your carbon footprint, while you’re at it.

Supercharge productivity with reliable services

So often, organizations struggle to stay efficient due to poor-performing IT systems, and plug the gap by hiring more staff, buying more machines, or otherwise overspending.

The Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust was wasting 947 hours a year dealing with blue screens across devices, problems with applications, and PCs running slowly. These situations would regularly go unreported, as clinicians were under pressure and focused on critical medical tasks. Without quick and easy access to the data they needed, healthcare workers were spending less time with patients and collaborating with other specialists–like GPs, mental health teams and social care professionals.

Meanwhile, one insurance company we worked with experienced productivity issues in its call center. Crashes, hangs and freezes meant customers were constantly cut off, and then had to wait up to 30 minutes to speak to someone again. So, the business employed more agents in an effort to minimize waiting times (and angry phone calls). This came at tremendous cost.

With Riverbed Aternity, you can pinpoint exactly when, where, and how frequently issues occur, and remedy them without needing to be told or waiting for things to go seriously wrong.

In fact, an international energy solutions company saved 2,000 employee hours using the solution to introduce proactive interventions. By making your people more productive, you can save money and their patience, leading to unexpected benefits like improved employee retention (which cuts recruitment and training costs as well). It’s a win-win.

 Cut the volume of support tickets and the time to resolve them 

IT support is another area that can drain financial resources, and your operators’ job satisfaction. After all, there’s a cost associated with tickets–generally averaging $100 or more each–and your team is the one that has to pay.

As Riverbed Aternity can proactively detect and address problems, it can drive an impressive reduction in not just the number of tickets you receive, but also the amount of them solved at Level 1–and the time in which it takes to close them altogether. Plus, because the tool gives insight remotely, IT staff don’t have to disturb users for their IP address or a breakdown of what they were doing on their computer when, saving everybody precious time and effort.

A multinational consumer goods company saw a 20% reduction in support tickets year-on-year after deploying the solution. Using that same proactive approach it was also able to detect when employees were away from their computers for long periods with their devices still on–like on breaks or overnight–shutting them down remotely and raking back an unbelievable $1.8 million a year to not only save the company $$ but make a strong contribution to their carbon footprint reduction objectives.

Energy company EDF used Riverbed Aternity in a similar way–checking when users last restarted their machines, sending them emails prompting them to do so if it had been a few days, and rebooting remotely if necessary. This helped keep hardware healthy, improved its stability, and reduced the number of support tickets received.

Break down the barriers to innovation

Innovation is another essential that comes with a price, and a risk. From upgrading hardware and amending application access to introducing virtualization and SaaS, you’re likely always looking ahead to the next useful technology. But that tech is only helpful if it works, and sometimes, it doesn’t. As you discover when real users find issues with the tool, and it’s too late to backtrack.

With Riverbed Aternity, you can test changes with those real users in a much safer way, creating small pilot groups before deciding whether or not to roll out updates to the masses. You can also see a clear baseline for performance before, during and after deployment, gaining an accurate picture of its effects, both positive and negative.

Take stock of your software licenses

Are all your staff using all your available software, all the time? License costs can add up, even if the applications themselves go unused. By implementing Riverbed Aternity, you can monitor the precise amount of time users spend on different software, and exactly what they use it for.

Perhaps employees only need the online version of a package you’re paying for on desktop devices. Maybe they don’t need certain tools at all. There’s only one way to find out, and once you do, you’ll be surprised how much you can save by downgrading or deleting unwanted solutions.

This was certainly the case for global food and beverage supplier Tate & Lyle. Using Riverbed Aternity, the company was able to allocate the correct number of software licenses to its user community, benefitting from a fantastic return on investment.

Refresh your hardware smarter, not sooner

Typically, organizations buy hardware with three- or four-year warranties. Once this time’s up, the machines are replaced. It’s expected, it’s planned for, and it’s written into your budget. But does it make sense?

Riverbed Aternity allows you to break free from this one-size-fits-all age-based approach. It constantly assesses whether devices still provide the optimal user experience, even after three or four years. When they do, less money is wasted on new hardware, and less tech ends up in landfill. When they don’t, they can be replaced–before the point that problems set in. Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, for example, used our solution to save a remarkable 42% of their devices this way.

Now it’s your turn. To learn more about Riverbed and Aternity, get in touch with our friendly team here. We look forward to supporting you in driving your budget-boosting, experience-enhancing IT transformation.

That’s why I’m looking forward to EMPOWEREDx—Riverbed’s annual customer community event. Last year’s global roadshow served as an opportunity to meet users and discover the challenges IT teams are facing, such as data overload and the need for more automation. This year, we’re visiting five cities across three continents to discuss Igniting Exceptional Digital Experiences, and to connect with those seeking to become leaders in the digital experience movement. In addition to Riverbed’s executive and technical speakers, I’m excited that we’ll have many customers—including EDF Energy, Global Credit Union, Princess Alexandra Hospital Trust NHS, Unilever, and many more—joining us to share their digital experience journeys. 

As Global CIO at Riverbed and formerly a CTO at JPMorgan Chase, I understand the allure and excitement of cutting-edge tech solutions. However, it’s important not to lose sight of the ultimate goal: enhancing the lives of the people who use these technologies. At Riverbed, our customers are at the heart of everything we do, and their satisfaction and success are the driving forces behind our innovations.

The EMPOWEREDx event is a reflection of our commitment to nurturing a strong relationship with our valued customers. It offers us the chance to listen directly to your experiences, challenges, and triumphs — gaining invaluable insights that shape the future of our solutions. EMPOWEREDx also provides a platform for us to showcase our latest innovations, giving you hands-on experiences and live demonstrations. Our hope is that this tangible and interactive approach further fosters trust and confidence in our products, as you get to witness firsthand how they can revolutionize your digital experiences and drive meaningful results in your organizations.

Join in for an immersive experience 

What sets EMPOWEREDx apart from other events is that we designed it to be a fully immersive event and not just a place to hear speakers talk. So bring your laptops or tablets and be prepared to take part in breakout sessions. You can expect presentations, demo or lab experiences, and roundtable discussions aligned with key use cases. For example, here’s what we’ll be covering throughout the event during the breakouts.

• Intelligent incident response & remediation: In this hands-on lab and discussion, you’ll delve into the world of intelligent automation and discover how it can free your IT staff from monotonous tasks, leading to a transformation within your IT organization.
• IT cost optimization: IT is always dealing with budget constraints, especially with today’s economic climate. The pressure is on to cut costs, and we’ll reveal how to do it while actually improving digital experiences.
• Redefining digital excellence: Learn how high-fidelity performance data from multiple domains enables IT teams to accurately identify user experience issues and take prescriptive, targeted actions. The result? Increased employee productivity, happier employees, improved service quality, and a positive customer experience.

Join us live!  

We’re looking forward to meeting you and having you take part in what’s sure to be an unforgettable event. If you live near one of these cities, mark your calendars. 

• August 23: Brisbane, Australia
• September 12: Dallas, USA
• September 19: NYC, USA
• September 19-20: Paris, France
• October 10: London, UK

EMPOWEREDx is an opportunity to develop deeper relationships with other Riverbed customers and gain insights that will help you become a leader in the digital experience movement. If you can’t make it to one of our stops, schedule a free demo of Riverbed solutions or Riverbed Acceleration solutions to discover how our technology creates transformative digital experiences. We look forward to seeing you at EMPOWEREDx!

This scenario, so familiar to us all, is very much like monitoring application performance in the cloud. When it comes to finding problems and the underlying cause–the place you need to be looking is often very different to what you think.

Cloud adoption is standard for many businesses and is accelerating across all sectors. According to Gartner, 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle by 2025. While migrating to the cloud makes businesses more agile, resilient and able to provide a true remote/hybrid experience for employees, it also comes with its fair share of challenges.

When it comes to cloud, end user experience is the ultimate measure for success. But when organizations migrate to a cloud environment, the infrastructure on which business-critical apps run is no longer within your control, nor is it with the cloud vendor. Therefore, cloud monitoring tools play a critical role in alerting IT teams when something goes wrong.

As multi-cloud environments grow in complexity and the costs associated with app downtime grow, teams need more than an alert when there is a problem. They need insights into where the issue is, what has caused it, and how best to solve it. To deliver an optimal end user experience, cloud monitoring works best as part of a more holistic toolkit, which is where a more sophisticated jump to a unified observability platform may be a better option.

Benefits of cloud monitoring

Cloud monitoring plays an important role in making sure that service-level objectives are being met, which is essential for a consistent user experience. It offer an excellent option for growing businesses, as it allows them to scale resources up or down on demand and can track large volumes of data across different cloud locations. Yes, its core value lies in assessing system health, analyzing long-term trends and sending out alerts when things go wrong. It also provides insights into how well apps are performing and how they are being used over time.

Additionally, cloud monitoring tools offer the flexibility to be used across desktop computers, tablets, and phones, making it easy for teams to track application performance from any location. This is especially helpful for distributed teams and remote workers who need to access company data no matter where they choose to work. Monitoring also strengthens the security of applications by identifying potential risks.

As cloud infrastructure and configurations are already in place, installing a monitoring tool is relatively straightforward. It strengthens business resilience because even if local infrastructure fails, cloud-based resources will still function, ensuring continuity of operations.

What cloud monitoring can’t do

While cloud monitoring provides numerous benefits, it does have limitations. Firstly, tools in this space often only track application usage and consumption. They can provide an alert to a poor user experience but may not offer the insights into why it was sub-par. IT teams are obliged to investigate every alert without context, which often results in alert fatigue. War rooms need to be set up to deal with major outages, which are resource intensive because IT teams spend a lot of time chasing bad leads and looking in the wrong places.

To resolve problems impacting the end user experience quickly, IT teams need to ascertain both the location and cause of a problem to ensure that the problem doesn’t keep resurfacing. That is why cloud monitoring shouldn’t be used in isolation, but as part of a suite of tools that include network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD), application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, and digital experience monitoring (DEM). This unified set of solutions tracks all moving parts in end user experience delivery, allowing IT teams to really zero in on the root cause of problems.

How unified observability fills the gap

Where monitoring tracks system performance and identifies known failures, observability goes the extra mile. If all the moving parts of delivering cloud based applications are thought of as a single system, Observability can look at the overall system with all it’s interdependencies and can identify the root cause of a problem by analyzing the data it gathers from many different sources. An observability solution not only assesses the health of that system but provides actionable insights as well. This allows IT teams to proactively address problems and resolve them faster.

Riverbed Unified Observability platform overcomes siloes to capture full-fidelity data from networks, applications, servers, client devices, cloud-native environments and end user devices. AI and ML are then used to analyze data streams, automating much of the troubleshooting work that would usually be carried out by IT engineers. This allows employees at any level to help solve user experience issues quickly. Insights are filtered, contextualized and prioritized, ready for action by the IT team.

Therefore, while cloud monitoring is crucial, meeting rising expectations for the end-user experience requires a more comprehensive and sophisticated solution. With a unified observability solution, you can set IT teams up for success by not only alerting them to problems but showing them where to look and automating the bulk of the troubleshooting process. This allows issues to be resolved before they escalate to outages, improving the end-user experience.

Streaming telemetry enables network administrators to gather a wide range of data, including performance metrics, operational statistics, health information, and other relevant details from network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, and servers. This data is typically transmitted using network protocols like gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call), NETCONF (Network Configuration Protocol), or other lightweight protocols.

Overall, streaming telemetry transforms network management by providing continuous, real-time data streams that facilitate proactive troubleshooting, optimization, and decision-making in large, complex network environments.

Streaming telemetry vs SNMP?

Streaming telemetry and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) are two different approaches to network monitoring and data collection. Here are the key differences between the two.

• Data Collection Method: SNMP uses a polling mechanism where the management system periodically queries network devices to retrieve specific data. The devices respond with the requested information. The issue is that a delay between polling intervals can resultin a lag in detecting and responding to network issues. Streaming telemetry, on the other hand, uses a push mechanism. The network devices proactively transmit data as a continuous, real-time stream without waiting for requests from the management system. It enables faster detection and response to network anomalies and events.
• Data Frequency and Granularity: SNMP collects data at regular polling intervals, for example, every five minutes or longer. The data collected is typically limited to predefined metrics specified in the MIB (Management Interface Base). Whereas streaming telemetry can collect and transmit data at sub-second intervals, providing real-time network visibility. It also enables IT to collect a wider range of data points, including custom metrics. It can deliver a more comprehensive view of network performance and behavior.
• Network Overhead: SNMP polling generates additional network traffic as the management system sends requests and devices respond with data. The frequency of polling can impact network performance, especially in large-scale deployments. Streaming telemetry reduces network overhead since data is sent proactively without the need for queries. Network utilization is also more efficient and can scale better in complex network environments.

In short, both SNMP and streaming telemetry have their strengths and are suitable for different monitoring scenarios. SNMP is a mature protocol supported by a wide variety of network devices, while streaming telemetry provides more real-time, granular, and flexible data collection capabilities. Organizations often use both, based on their monitoring requirements, device support, and need for real-time insights.

When should I recommend streaming telemetry vs SNMP?

The decision to use one versus the other depends on several factors, including the specific use case, the network infrastructure, and your clients’ requirements. Here are some considerations to help you decide when to use each.

Use streaming telemetry when your clients need to:

• Stream real-time data for applications that require immediate and continuous updates.
• Collect highly granular data, including fine-grained statistics, counters, or operational information.
• Monitor large-scale deployments and handle high data rates.
• Define custom data models and collect specific information.

Continue to use SNMP polling if:

• Your client’s network primarily consists of devices with SNMP capabilities. It might be simpler to stick with SNMP monitoring.
• Your clients needs to perform configuration changes or control devices remotely.

In some cases, using a combination of streaming telemetry and SNMP might be best. For example, you can use streaming for real-time monitoring and granular data collection while still using SNMP for device management and compatibility with legacy systems. Ultimately, the decision between which you use depends on your specific needs, the capabilities of your network devices, and the ecosystem of tools and systems you are using.

Riverbed NetIM

Fortunately, Riverbed NetIM supports both SNMP and streaming telemetry, as well as WMI, CLI, API, and synthetic testing for a comprehensive picture of how infrastructure performance affects network and application performance and ultimately, user experience. It provides integrated mapping, monitoring, and troubleshooting of network infrastructure. NetIM can capture infrastructure topology information, detect, and troubleshoot performance issues, map application network paths, plan for capacity needs, and diagram the network.

For more information on the benefits of Riverbed NetIM infrastructure monitoring, log into the Partner Portal.

By understanding these metrics, you’ll be better equipped to help your clients optimize your network and ensure seamless operations.

What is Throughput?

Throughput refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted through a network within a given time frame. It is commonly measured in bits per second (bps) or its multiples (Kbps, Mbps, Gbps). Throughput represents the network’s capacity to deliver data and is often associated with bandwidth. It measures how fast data can be transferred between devices, servers, or networks. Higher throughput indicates a network’s ability to handle larger data volumes and support bandwidth-intensive applications such as video streaming or large file transfers.

What is Network Latency (Delay)?

Network latency, also known as delay, is the time it takes for a data packet to travel from its source to its destination across a network. It is usually measured in milliseconds (ms). Latency can be affected by various factors such as the distance between network endpoints, network congestion, and the quality of network equipment. Lower latency signifies faster response times and better user experience. Applications that require real-time interaction, such as online gaming or voice/video conferencing, are particularly sensitive to latency. Minimizing latency is crucial to ensuring smooth and seamless communication.

What is Jitter?

Jitter refers to the variation in delay experienced by packets as they traverse a network. It is measured in milliseconds (ms) and represents the inconsistency or unevenness of latency. Jitter is caused by network congestion, routing changes, or varying levels of traffic. High jitter can lead to packet loss, out-of-order packet delivery, and increased latency, negatively impacting the performance of real-time applications. To ensure optimal performance, it is essential to minimize jitter and maintain a stable and predictable network environment.

Why are network performance metrics important?

Network performance metrics play a vital role in several aspects. Here’s how Riverbed can help.

Capacity Planning

Understanding throughput helps network administrators determine the network’s capacity and whether it can handle the expected workload. With Riverbed Network Observability solutions, organizations can proactively manage network and application performance. Additionally, NPM allows Network Operations teams to effectively manage costs by investing only in upgrading critical infrastructure, consolidating underutilize resources and managing assets of multiple business units. Riverbed Network Observability delivers the ability to auto-discover topology and continuously poll metrics, automate analyses, and generate capacity planning reports that are easily customizable to changing business and technology needs.

Performance Optimization

Monitoring latency and jitter allows organizations to identify and troubleshoot network performance issues. By pinpointing the root causes of delays or inconsistencies, network administrators can optimize network configurations and minimize disruptions. For performance optimization, Riverbed Network Observability provides cloud visibility by ensuring optimal use and performance of cloud resources and helps organizations manage the complexity of Hybrid IT with agile networking across data centers, branches and edge devices. Riverbed Network Observability helps overcome latency and congestion by proactively monitoring key metrics and their affect on application performance.

Quality of Service (QoS)

Network performance metrics enable the implementation of effective Quality of Service policies. By prioritizing specific types of traffic based on their requirements, such as voice or video data, organizations can ensure a consistent and reliable user experience. The Riverbed QoS system uses a combination of IP packet header information and advanced Layer-7 application flow classification to accurately allocate bandwidth across applications. The Riverbed QoS system organizes applications into classes based on traffic importance, bandwidth needs, and delay sensitivity.

SLA Compliance

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) often include performance metrics that must be met by network service providers. Monitoring and measuring these metrics allow organizations to hold providers accountable and ensure that agreed-upon performance standards are being met. Riverbed Network Observability monitors metrics associated with the service components that make up each SLA. By proactively monitoring the health of the network, issues can be identified and escalated quickly, before end users are impacted.

Help clients gain insights into their networks

Network performance metrics, including Throughput, Network Latency (Delay), and Jitter, provide valuable insights into the efficiency and reliability of a network. Riverbed makes it easy for your clients’ Network teams to monitor, optimize, troubleshoot, and analyze what’s happening across their hybrid network environment. With end-to-end visibility and actionable insights, Network teams can quickly and proactively resolve any network-based performance issues.

Riverbed Network Observability collects all packets, all flows, all device metrics, all the time, across all environments—cloud, virtual, and on-prem—providing enterprise-wide, business-centric monitoring of critical business initiatives.

Riverbed IQ is a SaaS-delivered Unified Observability service that surfaces impactful issues with the context to solve problems fast. It accomplishes this by leveraging full-fidelity data–across networks, infrastructure, applications, and end users–then applying AI/ML, correlation, and intelligent automation to surface actionable insights.

About CRN’s Tech Innovator Awards

According to CRN, these awards are meant to help solution providers identify products that are truly innovative and offer value for their customers. The 2023 CRN Tech Innovator Awards showcase IT vendor offerings that provide significant advances in IT–and partner growth opportunities–across a broad range of technology categories including cloud, networking, security, storage, and software. The awards spotlight innovative products across a wide range categories. The winners and finalists were chosen by CRN staff.

Four powerful intelligent automation use cases

The June release of Riverbed IQ, which was submitted for the award, focuses on intelligent automation across the Riverbed platform. Powered by the Riverbed LogiQ Engine, the Riverbed platform leverages AI, correlation, and automation to streamline repeatable processes with minimal human intervention and improved user satisfaction. Riverbed IQ uniquely offers broader automation use cases that extract insights across Riverbed telemetry and existing 3rd party tool silos to enable faster time to resolution.

With its powerful automation, analytical and integration capabilities, Riverbed currently supports four automation use cases:

1.  Incident response runbooks automate troubleshooting by replicating the best practices of IT experts. With the Riverbed portfolio’s full-fidelity insights, complex troubleshooting workflows become razor sharp, highly automated processes. Riverbed IQ replicates the advanced investigative processes of IT operations teams, providing context-driven insights that empower them to proactively resolve issues without escalating.
2. Security forensics automation with Riverbed IQ bridges the gap between NetOps and SecOps by leveraging automation to distill forensic data from the Riverbed NPM portfolio for use in traditional security tools, like SIEMs and SOARs. SecOps teams need easy access to all data sources and to easily integrate that data into their existing security tools. Riverbed IQ provides out-of-the-box runbooks for security investigations and threat hunting. These runbooks provide SecOps teams with easy access to Riverbed NPM and DEX data to help SecOps fully investigate threats with more context, reducing risk to the business.
3. Logic-driven desktop remediations harnesses the power of the Riverbed LogiQ Engine, logic-driven endpoint remediation workflows are capable of dynamically mimicking expert decision-making, resulting in instant fixes for simple to complex issues. Unlike other solutions that demand a multitude of remediation scripts customized to address narrow use cases, Riverbed Aternity sets itself apart by offering one-click remediation actions that can dynamically mimic expert decision-making by constructing logic-driven remediation workflows using reusable steps. This enables the resolution of both simple and complex issues. Combined with the fact that Aternity offers an extensive catalog of Mac and PC remediation actions for recurring end user experience issues such as application hangs, boot and login times, network connectivity, application crashes, OS crashes and more, IT can have more time to focus on innovation.
4. Intelligent ServiceNow ticketing empowers IT with their ideal scenario – automated ticket generation that is prioritized, remains up to date, and contains all the context IT needs to quickly remediate, directly from ServiceNow. Riverbed IQ’s integration with ServiceNow, combined with its ability to integrate with third party tools, uniquely provides ITOps users with context-driven insights directly in their ServiceNow UI.

The results are better IT agility and efficiency, fewer errors, and reduced risks.

More on Riverbed IQ

Interested in an observability platform that unifies data, insights, and actions across IT? To learn how your teams can harness the power of Intelligent Automation to gain efficiency, quality, speed, while reducing costs, visit Riverbed today for more information on Riverbed IQ or to Request Demo.

Visit CRN to learn more about this year’s Tech Innovator Awards.

The Virtual Workplace Evolution (VWE) stands as one of Germany’s of the largest desktop events, where customers, partners and vendors convene to exchange experiences and share insights on the digital workplace. The special feature of this event is the networking aspect. In presentations, companies share their strategies on how they are tackling current challenges, while solution providers showcase how their technologies are evolving.

Employee experience is omnipresent

The significance of employee experience permeated throughout the event. Companies such as Lufthansa, one of the largest airlines in Europe, have reported how they have transitioned from outsourcing to insourcing, leveraging cloud technologies and standardization for the workplace. In doing so, it has become increasingly clear how important it is to involve employees and stakeholders in the process. TUI Group, a German leisure, travel and tourism company which has realigned its global infrastructure for a hybrid workplace, also emphasized the importance of close stakeholder alignment.

Instead of relying on Microsoft 365, Kärcher, a leading manufacturer of commercial, industrial and consumer cleaning equipment, started using Google Workspace. This transition was executed swiftly yet cautiously, ensuring the inclusion of employees throughout the process.

User Experience Monitoring has arrived on the market

In addition to many companies, a number of software vendors were also represented at the VWE. Among them, the User Experience Monitoring sector had a strong presence, with representatives from ControlUp, Nexthink and Riverbed. A few years prior, Riverbed Aternity was the sole User Experience Monitoring vendor present at VWE. This surge in representation stems from the fact that considering user experience and employee experience has become indispensable for the successful implementation of IT projects, making this type of monitoring increasingly prevalent on the market.

Monitoring evolves into observability for the desktop

However, traditional user experience monitoring also has its limitations, and Riverbed Aternity in particular is at the forefront of addressing these constraints. Collecting data from end devices and enriching it with survey data, if necessary, is no longer enough. To successfully plan and implement IT projects, the needle must be found in the “haystack” of data. IT must have a clear understanding of what it is looking for. The same is true when companies troubleshoot with desktop monitoring tools. While the data is there, it must be enriched and interpreted using expert knowledge.

My presentation at the VWE highlighted that the future of employee and user experience monitoring lies in observability. Data may need to be enriched from other systems and automatically pre-analyzed and given context so that companies can derive the necessary added value from it. Observability also enables proactive interaction with the data, such as using flow charts to define which actions should be executed when analyzing or resolving specific situations.

Observability and IT data can support ESG and sustainability initiatives

This observability and IT data can also be leveraged to support ESG and sustainability goals. For instance, User Experience Monitoring data can indicate whether an end device remains operational throughout the night without any interaction or active computing work. With this data, various actions can be automatically triggered.

For example, in case the employee only switched off the monitor and left the workstation, the data constellation can be used to automatically execute actions. For instance:

• The employee can receive a pop-up or survey the next day, reminding them to shut down their computer at night to conserve energy.
• Additionally, IT could offer an automatic configuration change to put the computer to sleep when not in use for an extended period.

IT can also perform automatic evaluations to determine in advance how much energy or CO₂ can be saved through this feature.

Extend PC lifecycle to 5 to 7 years

HP, as a device manufacturer, addressed ESG and sustainability at the VWE, and demonstrated that workplace devices can be utilized for up to 7 years, thereby reducing the CO₂ footprint. Colleagues also emphasized the importance of ensuring that the PC’s performance does not adversely affect the user experience. This is precisely where observability plays a crucial role. The video below, “IT Asset Cost Reduction for Digital Workplace Teams,” gives a glimpse into the possibilities:

Watch Video

Until next year

The next Virtual Workplace Evolution takes place on June 19-21, 2024 in Berlin. We are already looking forward to reconnecting with our colleagues and industry peers for an inspiring exchange of experiences!

Digital dexterity for managers and employees

Gartner analyst Lane Stevenson predicted that organizations prioritizing digital dexterity enablement for both managers and employees will experience significant year-over-year revenue growth by 2027. Digital dexterity refers to the ability for employees to use and manipulate digital technologies effectively and efficiently. It involves understanding their proficiency to navigate digital interfaces, operate devices, and interact with digital tools and applications.

Leveraging employee productivity monitoring tools

According to Gartner analyst Tori Paulman, many employees are open to being tracked by productivity monitoring tools if there is a system in place that helps them improve their skills. Robust Digital Employee Experience (DEX) solutions, enable organizations to assess whether applications empower or frustrate employees. Understanding and enhancing the employee experience can have a positive impact on employee engagement, productivity and overall satisfaction.

Expanding the scope of DEX

Gartner analyst Dan Wilson asserted that DEX tool deployments focused solely on IT use cases will struggle to achieve sustainable ROI. It is crucial to consider non-IT use cases such as equitable experience and sustainability. DEX tools equipped with telemetry and sentiment analysis capabilities can identify digital friction experienced by individual employees or specific employee segments. This is particularly relevant for remote workers facing challenges like slow internet connectivity.

The intersection of sustainability and performance

During the conference, Gartner analysts emphasized the importance of evaluating DEX platforms based on their Green IT use cases. Autumn Stanish and Stuart Downes discussed the benefits of adopting a performance-driven refresh cycle for endpoint devices, rather than relying on calendar-based replacements.

DEX tools that monitor power consumption, optimize power-saving features, and encourage improved habits among employees lay the foundation for digital business leadership. However, the challenge lies in striking the right balance between sustainability and performance trade-offs. While extending the lifecycle of laptops reduces the annual total cost of ownership and carbon footprint, the number of performance risks for laptops increase. Examples include increased failure rates, compatibility issues with future OS and apps, insufficient hardware support for new workloads and more.

Create a strong digital workplace

The Gartner Digital Workplace Conference shed light on crucial aspects of today’s digital workplace strategy.

Prioritizing digital dexterity, leveraging employee productivity monitoring tools, expanding DEX beyond IT use cases, and embracing sustainability through Green IT initiatives are key considerations for organizations aiming to thrive in the digital age. By staying informed and implementing these insights, businesses can create a digital workplace that empowers employees, maximizes performance, and drives sustainable growth in the digital age.

Streaming telemetry enables network administrators to gather a wide range of data, including performance metrics, operational statistics, health information, and other relevant details from network devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, and servers. This data is typically transmitted using network protocols like gRPC (Google Remote Procedure Call), NETCONF (Network Configuration Protocol), or other lightweight protocols.

Overall, streaming telemetry transforms network management by providing continuous, real-time data streams that facilitate proactive troubleshooting, optimization, and decision-making in large, complex network environments.

Streaming telemetry vs SNMP?

Streaming telemetry and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) are two different approaches to network monitoring and data collection. Here are the key differences between the two.

• Data Collection Method: SNMP uses a polling mechanism where the management system periodically queries network devices to retrieve specific data. The devices respond with the requested information. The issue is that a delay between polling intervals can result in a lag in detecting and responding to network issues. Streaming telemetry, on the other hand, uses a push mechanism. The network devices proactively transmit data as a continuous, real-time stream without waiting for requests from the management system. It enables faster detection and response to network anomalies and events.
• Data Frequency and Granularity: SNMP collects data at regular polling intervals, for example, every five minutes or longer. The data collected is typically limited to predefined metrics specified in the MIB (Management Interface Base). Whereas streaming telemetry can collect and transmit data at sub-second intervals, providing real-time network visibility. It also enables IT to collect a wider range of data points, including custom metrics. It can deliver a more comprehensive view of network performance and behavior.
• Network Overhead: SNMP polling generates additional network traffic as the management system sends requests and devices respond with data. The frequency of polling can impact network performance, especially in large-scale deployments. Streaming telemetry reduces network overhead since data is sent proactively without the need for queries. Network utilization is also more efficient and can scale better in complex network environments.

In short, both SNMP and streaming telemetry have their strengths and are suitable for different monitoring scenarios. SNMP is a mature protocol supported by a wide variety of network devices, while streaming telemetry provides more real-time, granular, and flexible data collection capabilities. Organizations often use both, based on their monitoring requirements, device support, and need for real-time insights.

When should I use streaming telemetry vs SNMP?

The decision to use one versus the other depends on several factors, including the specific use case, the network infrastructure, and your requirements. Here are some considerations to help you decide when to use each.

Use streaming telemetry when you need to:

• Stream real-time data for applications that require immediate and continuous updates.
• Collect highly granular data, including fine-grained statistics, counters, or operational information.
• Monitor large-scale deployments and handle high data rates.
• Define custom data models and collect specific information.

Continue to use SNMP polling if:

• Your network primarily consists of devices with SNMP capabilities. It might be simpler to stick with SNMP monitoring.
• You need to perform configuration changes or control devices remotely.

In some cases, using a combination of streaming telemetry and SNMP might be best. For example, you can use streaming for real-time monitoring and granular data collection while still using SNMP for device management and compatibility with legacy systems. Ultimately, the decision between which you use depends on your specific needs, the capabilities of your network devices, and the ecosystem of tools and systems you are using.

Riverbed NetIM

Fortunately, Riverbed NetIM supports both SNMP and streaming telemetry, as well as WMI, CLI, API, and synthetic testing for a comprehensive picture of how infrastructure performance affects network and application performance and ultimately, user experience. It provides integrated mapping, monitoring, and troubleshooting of network infrastructure. NetIM can capture infrastructure topology information, detect, and troubleshoot performance issues, map application network paths, plan for capacity needs, and diagram the network.

For more information on the benefits of Riverbed NetIM infrastructure monitoring, click here.

Traditional security tools like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) are only as good as the intelligence that they ingest.

In a recent report from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), Analyst Ken Buckler reflects on why SecOps needs to leverage observability data for faster, more complete incident response.

Cybersecurity facing mounting challenges

According to Buckler, modern cybersecurity faces a range of challenges that IT leaders must overcome to ensure effective threat detection. One example is the complexity of today’s networks, which feature copious devices, endpoints, and applications. This complexity hinders SecOps’ ability to gain consistent monitoring of the environment for threat detection.

The exponential growth of data volume by network devices and applications, analyzing and processing this data in real time is a formidable task. It demands scalable data collection, storage, and analysis techniques, plus advanced technologies, like machine learning, correlation, and automation. As a result, insufficient visibility into certain network constructs, devices and applications lead to security blind spots. Addressing this challenge involves implementing standardized monitoring practices and utilizing network visibility tools to enhance observability.

Integration is essential

Integrating observability with existing security tools is vital for a comprehensive security pos­ture. However, the complexity and diversity of security technologies pose integration challenges. Overcoming this obstacle requires careful planning, ensuring interoperability, and leveraging auto­mation and orchestration capabilities.

To tackle these challenges, organizations must invest in comprehensive observability solutions, such as Riverbed IQ, that encompass real-time monitoring, advanced analytics, and intelligent automation. By implementing standardized monitoring practices, utilizing efficient data processing technologies, enhancing visibility through full-fidelity telemetry, and integrating observability with existing security tools, organizations can bolster threat detection, incident response, and overall cybersecu­rity resilience.

Riverbed IQ automates cybersecurity incident response

Riverbed IQ can aid in the investigation of cyberthreats using the Riverbed LogiQ Engine intelligent automation capabilities. It investigates threats found in traditional security tools, like SIEM or SOAR solutions. The SIEM or SOAR initiates a request for supporting diagnostic data using an API. Riverbed IQ then parses this request and the kicks off a low-code security runbook that automates the collection of network forensics data from across the Riverbed portfolio or from third-party data. By distilling the forensic data and sending actionable insights back to the requesting solution, SecOps teams gain easy access to the supporting data they need to drive intelligent security investigations and mitigate cyber threats.

For more information on the need for observability data in cybersecurity, read the EMA white paper, From Complexity to Clarity: Resolving Challenges in Cybersecurity Observability.

While sustainability, ethics, and governance are generally considered non-financial performance indicators, the role of an ESG program is to ensure accountability and implementation of systems and processes to manage a company’s impacts, such as its CO₂ footprint and the way it treats employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders.

The challenge of accurate figures

To establish a trustworthy ESG initiative, businesses must acquire accurate and reliable data from different fields. This challenge is particularly evident in the realm of IT, as illustrated by the following example:

Organizations that maintain their own data centers have the capability of accurately reporting the energy usage of these facilities. By leveraging their personal power circuits and electrical meters, this reporting can be done with great accuracy. However, determining the power consumption of workstation computers, monitors, and printers becomes more challenging, especially when they are located in home offices rather than the company’s own buildings. As a result, estimating the energy consumption of workstation computers is the common practice. Unfortunately, many companies simply take the maximum electricity consumption or published average values for their calculations, leading to highly inaccurate results.

While this inaccurate data is sufficient in providing an overview of the situation, the goal of ESG programs, however, is to drive improvement while considering the cost/benefit. For example, simply replacing an old desktop PC with a modern mini-PC is not necessarily a more sustainable solution. It’s important to account for the CO₂ footprint associated with manufacturing new computers. The key instead is to understand whether users can achieve the same user experience with their existing PCs as with a new one, or if a small upgrade will help enhance efficiency and sustainability.

Observability brings the necessary insights

And this is where Observability helps. Observability represents the next stage in the evolution of IT monitoring and is being implemented in various aspects of IT. The information obtained from this source may find be leveraged in ESG initiatives, especially to make more precise assessments and to better evaluate the cost/benefit question.

This application extends beyond the workplace, where it can help determine how user-friendly and efficient older computers are and whether they should be upgraded or replaced when necessary. It can also identify which applications generate particularly high levels of network traffic, which in turn lead to a corresponding CO₂ impact from the data centers across data networks. With Observability data, it becomes possible to assess, plan, and execute data center consolidations or cloud migration with regards to ESG goals.

Using IT data for the ESG perspective

IT departments, alongside Observability solution providers like Riverbed, can make valuable contributions to various ESG initiatives. The data gathered in IT can be harnessed and used for sustainability projects to achieve measurable successes that are also cost-beneficial. It is important to tailor the parameters used in the calculations to the specific situation of each company, considering variables such as the CO2eq/kWh value and energy costs differ from country to country and company to company.

Before starting large ESG projects, IT departments can achieve success with small “quick wins.” It is easy to analyze whether a server in the data center is still operational but no longer in use. Another starting point is to determine whether users are shutting down their computers at the end of the work day or putting them in sleep mode. If not, a simple change to the settings can ensure that the computer is automatically sent to “sleep” after a few minutes of idle time. However, since sustainability is also about fostering awareness, it can be equally effective to make users aware of specific situations automatically to educate them about the impact on the environment.

The data from IT’s observability tools brings more context to sustainability projects, and thereby leads to the discovery of quick wins and opportunities for improvement.

This blog looks at these three pillars and analyzes how Riverbed takes them further to unify data, insights and actions for all IT.

What are logs?

Logs refers to the collection of data generated by an application or system as it runs. Logs record events that happen within a system and provide a detailed record of its behavior. Logs are important because they record events and activities that happen within a system, providing a detailed history of its behavior. Logs are helpful for debugging issues, troubleshooting, and auditing. When something goes wrong, logs can help engineers identify what happened and when, as well as providing clues as to why it happened.

What are metrics?

Metrics are numerical values that represent the behavior of a system over time. They are typically collected at regular intervals and can be used to track trends and identify anomalies. Metrics are often used to monitor system performance, such as CPU usage, memory utilization, or traffic throughput.

Metrics are important because they provide data that can be used to track system performance over time. By collecting and analyzing metrics, engineers can identify patterns and trends, which allows them to optimize performance, troubleshoot issues, and make informed decisions about system capacity and resource allocation.

What are traces?

Traces refer to the ability to follow a request as it moves through a distributed system. Tracing helps engineers identify the source of a problem, understand the flow of data, and optimize the performance of a system. Tracing involves instrumenting the code and collecting data at various points in the system, then aggregating and analyzing that data to create a trace of a request’s journey. Traces making it easier to diagnose and resolve problems. They can help identify where performance bottlenecks are occurring and help pinpoint the root cause of issues.

Together, the three pillars of observability provide a comprehensive view of a system, enabling engineers to monitor, debug, and optimize it. They form the foundation of observability, allowing engineers to gain insight into complex systems and improve their reliability, scalability, and maintainability.

Riverbed Unified Observability unifies data, insights and actions across IT

Riverbed IQ is a SaaS-delivered unified observability service that captures full-fidelity performance metrics, applies machine learning and correlation to identify to separate false positives from critical events, and then automates the investigative workflows of IT experts to gather the diagnostic data necessary to resolve problems quickly.

In short, Riverbed expands on the three pillars of observability to deliver an observability solution that unifies data, insights, and actions for all IT.

Unified data is the comprehensive support of full-fidelity telemetry from across diverse sources, including devices, networks, applications, cloud-native environments, users, and third-party solutions. Unlike other solutions that sample data to deal with the scale of today’s distributed environments, Riverbed captures every transaction, packet, and flow, as well as actual user experience for every type of application. Full-fidelity data gives IT a complete picture of what’s happening and what has happened, without missing key events due to sampling. It provides the foundation of unified observability.

Unified insights mean IT solves the right problems fast to keep users productive. With the best data, AI and multifaceted correlations, plus workflow automation, Riverbed IQ delivers context-rich, filtered, and prioritized insights that help IT teams understand the scope and severity of issues and the cause of poor performance.

Unified actions employs low-code runbooks to replicate and automate the best practices of IT experts to provide probable root cause of performance of security incidents. By automating the gathering of supporting diagnostic data from disparate solutions, Riverbed IQ helps IT teams accelerate problem-solving, break down silos, and avoid time-consuming war rooms.

Why Riverbed IQ Unified Observability?

Riverbed IQ Unified Observability unifies data, insights, and actions to empower all IT teams to deliver seamless digital experiences and end-to-end performance visibility. It uniquely leverages a combination of enterprise-wide data collection, sophisticated AI techniques, and intelligent automation to speed common and repetitive IT tasks. As a result, IT can achieve the following benefits:

• Faster problem detection and resolution: With unified observability, it becomes easier to detect problems as they occur, rather than waiting for user complaints or failures. Once a problem is detected, Riverbed IQ can help pinpoint the root cause of the issue. Riverbed Unified Observability uses intelligent automation to gather supporting evidence and context. This reduces the time it takes to resolve the problem and get the system back up and running.
• Better performance: By monitoring key metrics and indicators, unified observability helps identify performance areas that are not optimal. This can help improve performance of networks, applications, and users and prevent potential issues before they occur.
• Improved collaboration: Observability tools can provide visibility into the IT environment to multiple teams across an organization. This visibility can improve collaboration between teams and help everyone work towards a common goal of improving performance and reliability.
• Better customer experiences: By resolving problems faster, Riverbed IQ helps improve digital experiences, which leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Extend the three pillars of observability to include unified data, insights and actions.

Some of the most significant challenges include:

• Innovation: Patient-centered care means having the right expertise available wherever the patient may be located. Technologies such as the Da Vinci Surgical System allow remote surgeons to operate and perform complex surgeries remotely.
• Security: Healthcare organizations must protect sensitive patient data, including medical records, personal information, and financial data, from unauthorized access or theft. As healthcare systems are digitally managed, the risk of data breaches and cyberattacks increases, making data security a top concern. For example, healthcare organizations are often top targets of ransomware and data breaches including the 2018 SingHealth data breach.
• Interoperability: Different healthcare systems and applications may use diverse data formats and protocols, making it difficult to share information and coordinate care across healthcare providers and settings. This lack of interoperability can result in errors, delays, and redundancies in care delivery.
• System Integration: Integrating disparate technologies, applications and devices is critical for healthcare organizations. However, many systems are not designed to work together, resulting in inefficiencies, data inconsistencies and difficulty in exchanging data and paralyzing hospital operations.
• Regulatory Compliance: Healthcare IT networks must comply with numerous regulatory requirements and data privacy regulations.
• Cost: Implementing and maintaining healthcare IT networks can be expensive, particularly for smaller organizations. Healthcare providers must also ensure that their networks can support the demands of the clinical setting, such as high-volume data transfer and real-time data processing. Learn more about how you can reduce costs for devices, software, cloud and network with Riverbed.
• User adoption and training: Healthcare providers and staff may resist new technology or need more skills to use it effectively. Adequate training and support are critical to ensure the optimal use of technology.

The role of IT in managing change

Implementing and managing healthcare tech is an IT job, but the planning process calls for collaboration with clinical leaders to ensure optimal care delivery when and where needed. Investing in appropriate resources, including people, processes, and technology, is vital to providing exceptional patient experiences. To keep up with these changes, hospitals need to invest in building futuristic architectures that can support technological advances to enhance patient experience, empower healthcare workforce, and streamline operations.

End-to-end network visibility to harmonize healthcare IT

New-age healthcare tech such as heart monitors, biosensors, oximeters, BP monitors, etc. and the ability to view health reports online can help promote real-time collaboration and consultation with colleagues and specialists during hospital rounds or practice hours, from clinics in regional areas, or whenever and wherever needed. The benefits are not limited to accessing patient records and improving patient care. It can significantly help manage daily hospital operations such as staff rostering, equipment sterilization, bookings for surgeries, and more. However, these devices increase the load on the hospitals’ LAN and WiFi network.

For the successful integration of technologies to enable communication, it’s crucial to have a dependable underlying network that supports them. To achieve this, IT teams need comprehensive end-to-end network visibility to keep all the applications connected.

Addressing challenges associated with new-age healthcare tech

Substantial use of IT heightens the risk of a data breach. Managing various endpoints, including mobile users, medical devices, and applications, is complex—bring your own device (BYOD) could add to the complexity. An increase in the number of devices can also strain the infrastructure, bandwidth and IT resources.

Hospitals can deploy tools such as  Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) to address these challenges. Aternity DEM is a comprehensive platform that captures and stores technical telemetry from desktop and mobile endpoint devices. It enables IT teams to gain better visibility into the actual user experience and device performance, which can inform decisions on device replacement based on performance and help identify and eliminate redundant or underused software licenses. By curtailing shadow IT, IT teams can manage software usage more effectively, identify and eliminate wasteful solutions and utilize budgets more efficiently.

The Riverbed NetProfiler proved to be incredibly valuable for monitoring the complex hospital network, which requires constant communication between internal and external endpoints. With end-to-end network monitoring and visibility, the hospital can manage information flow, monitor patient health in real time, process insurance claims, maintain medical records, and improve overall operations.

The Riverbed AppResponse enables the hospital to monitor and analyze network-based application performance, allowing them to quickly resolve issues to avoid disruptions in daily operations. The Riverbed NetIM maps application network paths, providing granular-level monitoring and troubleshooting of the IT infrastructure. This mapping is particularly crucial in a hospital setting, where staff across various functions tend to use different applications. Lastly, the Riverbed Portal provides integrated network and application insights, enabling the hospital to gain control of their network and ensure that their IT systems are functioning properly.

Invest in operational excellence

In conclusion, end-to-end network visibility unleashes the hidden aspects of the healthcare ecosystem, allowing caregivers to deliver high-quality and personalized patient care. To keep up with these advances, hospitals can invest in adding futuristic tools and applications supported by a high-performance network to enhance patient experience and operational excellence. Learn how to get more out of your IT budget with Aternity DEM before you plan to integrate new technologies to your healthcare setup’s IT stack.

Upon successful exploitation of this vulnerability, an attacker could gain sufficient access to install a web shell inside the MOVEit application. This would allow the bad actor full access to read, write and delete contents of the various databases it utilizes, such as MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Azure SQL. Multiple vendors have published details about the attack vector, revealing a consistent pattern of attempting to infiltrate the vulnerable system via SQL injection to implant the web shell.

Read on to discover three ways Riverbed can help safeguard your organization from potential breaches.

1. Uncover historical activity

If you have unknowingly been scanned or implanted with this web shell, it is important to note that these attackers have been known to use a range of IP addresses. This range is released with the CVE Indicators of Notice. Thanks to Riverbed NetProfiler‘s high-resolution, raw-flow retention that comfortably goes back multiple years, the search through history to investigate any traces of offending IP addresses is made simple.

Simply copy and paste these IPs, set your desired time range, and then see whether there has been any activity from these IP addresses in the past.

NetProfiler then provides detailed, highly-customizable interactive reports, such as report shown below, on the various TCP or UDP communication these IPs have been engaging. In easy to understand tables, it provides port number and traffic volumes.

2. Visualize relationships between IP addresses

Visualizing the relationships of IP end points will usually bring out hidden trends and patterns in the attack vector that may not be as easily apparent in reading reports and tables. NetProfiler provides dynamically-generated, interactive visualizations of the TCP/UDP communication with the attacker’s IPs.

3. Track attack signatures from packets

Most attacks exhibit distinct patterns that can be captured through network activity analysis. In this case, the Indicators of Compromise (IOC) are specific HTTP headers present in the attacker’s requests:

• X-siLock-Comment
• X-siLock-Step1
• X-siLock-Step2
• X-siLock-Step3

Configuring the below definition for “Web Application” within Riverbed AppResponse ensures that even a single packet detected in the full bandwidth of data being analyzed by the appliance will trigger an event. Packets can be reviewed, and metrics for that TCP and HTTP exchange will be logged.

Once the definition is in place, you can observe detailed packet-based metrics and access the actual packets through right-click functionality.

Here are some of the typical alerts that AppResponse offers, with numerous other categories available:

Summary

In this blog, we explored how attack vectors follows common patterns to scan for vulnerabilities and how packet and flow-based monitoring tools can be used to analyze past incidents and detect ongoing scans and threats. To learn more about how Riverbed Observability tools can help you protect against malicious actors, please reach out to our experts here.

By understanding these metrics, you’ll be better equipped to optimize your network and ensure seamless operations.

What is Throughput?

Throughput refers to the amount of data that can be transmitted through a network within a given time frame. It is commonly measured in bits per second (bps) or its multiples (Kbps, Mbps, Gbps). Throughput represents the network’s capacity to deliver data and is often associated with bandwidth. It measures how fast data can be transferred between devices, servers, or networks. Higher throughput indicates a network’s ability to handle larger data volumes and support bandwidth-intensive applications such as video streaming or large file transfers.

What is Network Latency (Delay)?

Network latency, also known as delay, is the time it takes for a data packet to travel from its source to its destination across a network. It is usually measured in milliseconds (ms). Latency can be affected by various factors such as the distance between network endpoints, network congestion, and the quality of network equipment. Lower latency signifies faster response times and better user experience. Applications that require real-time interaction, such as online gaming or voice/video conferencing, are particularly sensitive to latency. Minimizing latency is crucial to ensuring smooth and seamless communication.

What is Jitter?

Jitter refers to the variation in delay experienced by packets as they traverse a network. It is measured in milliseconds (ms) and represents the inconsistency or unevenness of latency. Jitter is caused by network congestion, routing changes, or varying levels of traffic. High jitter can lead to packet loss, out-of-order packet delivery, and increased latency, negatively impacting the performance of real-time applications. To ensure optimal performance, it is essential to minimize jitter and maintain a stable and predictable network environment.

Why are network performance metrics important?

Network performance metrics play a vital role in several aspects.

Capacity Planning

Understanding throughput helps network administrators determine the network’s capacity and whether it can handle the expected workload. With Riverbed Riverbed’s Unified Network Performance Management (NPM) solutions, organizations can proactively manage network and application performance. Additionally, NPM allows Network Operations teams to effectively manage costs by investing only in upgrading critical infrastructure, consolidating underutilize resources and managing assets of multiple business units. Riverbed NPM delivers the ability to auto-discover topology and continuously poll metrics, automate analyses, and generate capacity planning reports that are easily customizable to changing business and technology needs.

Performance Optimization

Monitoring latency and jitter allows organizations to identify and troubleshoot network performance issues. By pinpointing the root causes of delays or inconsistencies, network administrators can optimize network configurations and minimize disruptions. For performance optimization, Riverbed NPM provides cloud visibility by ensuring optimal use and performance of cloud resources and helps organizations manage the complexity of Hybrid IT with agile networking across data centers, branches and edge devices. Riverbed NPM helps overcome latency and congestion by proactively monitoring key metrics and their affect on application performance.

Quality of Service (QoS)

Network performance metrics enable the implementation of effective Quality of Service policies. By prioritizing specific types of traffic based on their requirements, such as voice or video data, organizations can ensure a consistent and reliable user experience. The Riverbed QoS system uses a combination of IP packet header information and advanced Layer-7 application flow classification to accurately allocate bandwidth across applications. The Riverbed QoS system organizes applications into classes based on traffic importance, bandwidth needs, and delay sensitivity.

SLA Compliance

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) often include performance metrics that must be met by network service providers. Monitoring and measuring these metrics allow organizations to hold providers accountable and ensure that agreed-upon performance standards are being met. Riverbed NPM monitors metrics associated with the service components that make up each SLA. By proactively monitoring the health of the network, issues can be identified and escalated quickly, before end users are impacted.

Gain insights into your network

Network performance metrics, including Throughput, Network Latency (Delay), and Jitter, provide valuable insights into the efficiency and reliability of a network. Riverbed makes it easy for Network teams to monitor, optimize, troubleshoot, and analyze what’s happening across their hybrid network environment. With end-to-end visibility and actionable insights, Network teams can quickly and proactively resolve any network-based performance issues.

Riverbed’s  unified NPM collects all packets, all flows, all device metrics, all the time, across all environments—cloud, virtual, and on-prem—providing enterprise-wide, business-centric monitoring of critical business initiatives.

The report, WAN Transformation with SD-WAN: Establishing a Mature Foundation for SASE Success, is based on EMA’s survey of IT professionals across North America and Europe. The report finds that SASE technology is the next step in the evolution of WANs. According to the research, many enterprises are finding that the transition from SD-WAN to SASE is not trivial. The report examines how enterprises are transforming their networks to take the next step toward SASE.

Interesting findings

This WAN transformation research has some more interesting findings on WAN usage. The report states, “71% apply WAN acceleration to their networks, and nearly all of them leverage their SD-WAN vendors for this acceleration.” This may be based on a misconception that SD-WAN can provide comprehensive WAN acceleration.

The EMA paper goes on to state, “SD-WAN enables enterprises to add more bandwidth to their WAN underlay via more affordable broadband internet connections. But more bandwidth does not guarantee application performance. An SD-WAN strategy must also include WAN acceleration.”

WAN acceleration is key

Conventional approaches to enterprise networking are no longer sufficient. Today’s distributed environment supports multiple data centers, remote branch offices, and work-from-anywhere users. And it can be challenging to build networks that are agile, high performing, and that effectively connect users and applications. In addition, IT teams are faced with the challenge of deploying these networks in the most cost effective way.

Many companies have implemented SD-WAN to provide agile and efficient networks that connect their distributed users and applications. The benefits of SD-WAN include increasing WAN capacity with cost-effective internet Broadband, streamlining network operations, and accelerating site provisioning. However, while SD-WAN may in some cases improve network efficiency, it doesn’t address serious user experience issues resulting from latency or heavy data application traffic. Even after SD-WAN is deployed, companies may still experience network and application performance issues. These issues cannot be solved with additional bandwidth.

Riverbed WAN acceleration solutions can work together with and on top of SD-WAN solutions. This will foster higher performing networks, stronger application performance, and improved business productivity. Watch this video to learn how SD-Wan and App Acceleration are better together.

Challenges with internet for primary WAN connectivity

The EMA research also details challenges to using the internet for primary WAN connectivity. The report states, “In general, the internet is not an enterprise-class WAN connectivity solution.” The chart below lists these challenges, the biggest of which are security risk and complexity of managing multiple ISP relationships. It makes sense that security risk is the biggest challenge given the internet is a public network that is “inherently insecure.”

The research also found application performance, instability across internet service providers, and inconsistent global performance across geographies to be challenges. These challenges illustrate the reality of the internet—inconsistent performance and instability that leads to application performance problems.

We frequently hear from customers that inconsistent global performance is a major problem. Using the internet for primary WAN connectivity may work out to some degree for organizations that operate in geographies with good bandwidth and connectivity—for example, in western Europe or the United States. However, for international companies with branches across the globe, the performance and experience for each remote branch is very different. In addition, with users working from home where the last mile service provider is randomly based on the employee choice, the company’s IT is no longer even in control.

To meet these challenges head on, organizations need a solution that can help greatly improve the user experience. Riverbed Acceleration solutions provide fast, secure acceleration of apps over any network to users, whether mobile, remote, or in office. Built on decades of WAN optimization leadership and innovation, our solutions power cloud, SaaS, and client applications at peak speeds. And they overcome network speed bumps such as latency, congestion, and suboptimal last-mile conditions. To learn more about our Acceleration solutions click here. 

A need for more granular network monitoring

The WAN transformation research also reveals that while 73% of organizations are relying on the native monitoring provided by their SD-WAN vendors, many are finding it inadequate—with only 41% being fully satisfied with this third-party monitoring.

Users are interested in seeking more granular network monitoring telemetry from third parties that can provide this information. Currently, IT teams may be using both but there is a trend that as network monitoring requires more overlay/underlay visibility, more powerful third-party tools will be required.

Keysight Technologies case study

The EMA report also features an impactful Riverbed case study that describes how Keysight Technologies leverages Riverbed Acceleration and Riverbed Network Performance Management solutions to enable better performance and fast troubleshooting. Keysight, a long-time customer of Riverbed, is an American S&P 500 electronics manufacturing firm leveraging Riverbed Acceleration and Riverbed solutions to gain network visibility and enable faster troubleshooting and better performance.

Due to the nature of its business, large files are distributed from one location to another on a daily basis, requiring significant time and resources. In addition, Keysight faced challenges with network visibility to understand dependencies. Keysight uses Riverbed SteelHead WAN optimization to scale its existing bandwidth and achieve better performance and control. “Riverbed’s acceleration solution, SteelHead, has improved our network performance by 25%. It is extremely effective in reducing the time we spend on transferring files from one office to another” said Ray Schumacher, Network Architect at Keysight Technologies. Additionally, SteelHead improved disaster recovery capabilities by dramatically speeding up device backups across offices around the world.

Keysight wanted to use additional Riverbed visibility tools to seamlessly integrate with SteelHead and digest all the data passing through SteelHead. Keysight began to use Riverbed NetProfiler and Riverbed AppResponse, which provided better visibility for real-time troubleshooting and historical packet data. As a result, the Keysight team is able to fix issues proactively and diagnose problems before their user community raises tickets. “Looking into the network is instrumental to see what’s really going on in the environment, which provides us with insights that we can act on to improve productivity and performance.”

Learn more

Interested in more findings from the report? Click here to access the insightful WAN transformation research from EMA and establish a foundation for SASE success!

The building blocks of Digital Experience Monitoring

At its core, DEM involves monitoring digital services from the end user’s perspective. This means understanding how different elements of a digital platform, such as web pages or mobile apps, perform for the user.

There are two key components in DEM: Real User Monitoring (RUM) and Synthetic Monitoring. RUM involves collecting data from real users in real-time to understand their experiences with a digital platform. This data provides valuable insights into how users interact with a platform, helping to identify any potential performance issues.

On the other hand, Synthetic Monitoring involves simulating user interactions with a platform to identify any potential bottlenecks or performance issues before they affect real users. This proactive approach helps to maintain optimal performance levels and ensure a seamless user experience.

The importance of Digital Experience Monitoring

In today’s digital age, user experience is king. A smooth, seamless, and intuitive digital experience can be the difference between a one-time visitor and a loyal customer. By implementing DEM, businesses can gain a better understanding of how their digital platforms are performing, identify any potential issues, and take proactive steps to optimize the user experience.

A key benefit of DEM is that it provides actionable insights. Instead of just collecting data, DEM allows businesses to understand what the data means and how it can be used to improve performance. This could mean making changes to a website’s design to make it more user-friendly, or optimizing a mobile app to improve load times.

Moreover, DEM is not just about improving the user experience—it also has a direct impact on a business’s bottom line. A better user experience leads to higher customer satisfaction, which in turn leads to increased customer loyalty and higher revenue.

Implementing Digital Experience Monitoring

Implementing DEM involves a combination of technology and strategy. On the technology front, businesses need to invest in the right tools to collect, analyze, and interpret user experience data. These tools need to be able to provide real-time insights and identify any potential performance issues as soon as they occur.

On the strategic front, businesses need to have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve with DEM. This could be improving the load times of a website, increasing the responsiveness of a mobile app, or enhancing the overall user experience across all digital platforms.

Once the goals are defined, businesses can then use the insights gained from DEM to implement changes and track their impact. This iterative process of monitoring, implementing changes, and monitoring again ensures continuous improvement and optimization of the user experience.

Aternity’s role in Digital Experience Monitoring

Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) offers a unique, comprehensive solution for businesses aiming to optimize the digital experience for their end-users. Its key strength lies in measuring and analyzing every user interaction across applications, whether cloud-based, on-premise, or mobile. This provides businesses with a clear understanding of how their tech infrastructure affects daily productivity and customer satisfaction.

Aternity DEM captures data directly from the end-user’s device, providing a true “outside-in” perspective for a more accurate reflection of the user experience. Its flexibility allows for monitoring applications regardless of their delivery method, while proactive performance benchmarking and alert thresholds help identify potential issues before they significantly impact the user experience. This comprehensive, user-centered approach empowers businesses to enhance productivity, reduce downtime, and improve overall user satisfaction.

The future of Digital Experience Monitoring

As technology continues to evolve, so too will the field of Digital Experience Monitoring. New technologies such as AI and machine learning are already being used to provide more detailed and accurate insights into user behavior. These technologies will continue to play a vital role in the future of DEM, enabling businesses to provide personalized, intuitive, and seamless digital experiences that exceed user expectations.

Digital Experience Monitoring is a powerful tool for any business operating in the digital space. By providing valuable insights into user behavior and performance issues, DEM enables businesses to proactively optimize the user experience, leading to higher customer satisfaction, increased loyalty, and ultimately, greater success. Learn more about full-spectrum DEM here.

Riverbed uses intelligent automation to automate a wide range of IT processes, including incident response, security forensics investigations, desktop remediation, and providing intelligence to trouble ticketing. Automation can help improve operational efficiency, reduce errors, and enhance the overall quality of IT services.

Intelligent IT automation also provides actionable insights to help IT teams identify and address potential problems before they occur. This can help organizations achieve greater agility and flexibility in their IT operations, while also reducing costs and improving the overall quality of service.

Why use Intelligent Automation?

The proliferation of new applications is generating an overwhelming volume of data, leading to alert overload. It is simply no longer possible for IT teams to analyze and correlate all this data manually and still meet operational expectations.

In addition, alert overload is compounded by today’s scarcity of skilled IT resources–fewer IT staff are left to do more of the work. And, these already short-staffed IT teams must often chase false positives, events that don’t impact digital experience. The lack of automation of these workflows results in longer resolution times of critical issues and higher error rates, both of which can negatively impact user experience and business performance.

How Riverbed IQ leverages Intelligent Automation

Riverbed IQ unified observability service automates incident response of performance and security events and provides intelligent trouble ticketing to ServiceNow.

Incident response

With the Riverbed portfolio’s full-fidelity insights and rich analytics, complex troubleshooting workflows become razor sharp, highly automated processes. Riverbed IQ replicates the advanced investigative processes of Network Operations teams, providing context-driven insights that empower them to proactively resolve issues without escalating.

Security forensics investigations

SecOps teams want easy access to all data sources and to integrate that data into their SOAR and SIEM tools. Riverbed IQ provides out-of-the-box runbooks for security investigations. These runbooks give SecOps teams easy access to Riverbed telemetry data to help fully investigate threats. As a result, security tools gain more context for threat investigations, reducing risk to the business.

Auto-populating trouble tickets

In today’s modern IT market, targeted delivery of fast, context-driven insights to ITSM solutions can mean the difference between business triage and business optimization. Riverbed IQ uniquely delivers deep ServiceNow incident context that streamlines ticket creation and reduces escalation. Riverbed IQ links back to the originating source telemetry to assemble supporting troubleshooting data. Data collected can include network, infrastructure, application, and end user experience.

Automation guides Aternity remediations

Aternity end user experience monitoring is also leveraging intelligent automation from the Riverbed Observability platform. Unlike other solutions that require a multitude of remediation scripts that address narrow use cases, Aternity sets itself apart by offering one-click remediation actions that can dynamically mimic expert decision-making by constructing logic-driven remediation workflows using reusable steps. This enables the resolution of both simple and complex issues. Combined with the fact that Aternity offers an extensive catalog of Macintosh and PC remediations for recurring desktop issues such as application hangs, boot and login times, network connectivity, application crashes, OS crashes and more, IT can have more time to focus on innovation.

What’s the difference between AI and Intelligent Automation?

AI or Artificial Intelligence is excellent at sorting and classifying both structured and unstructured data. It can provide deep insights into trends, patterns and outliers. For example, a well-trained AI algorithm can execute tasks like recognizing the contents of an image, understanding the contents of a document, correlating related events, and more.

Intelligent automation, on the other hand, refers to the use of advanced technologies such as AI, machine learning, correlation, and automation workflows to automate IT processes. Intelligent automation combines the power of automation with AI to create systems that make decisions with minimal human intervention.

AI is a necessary component of intelligent automation. The main difference between the two is that AI is focused on creating intelligence, while intelligent automation is focused on automating specific tasks or processes to increase efficiency and productivity.

Benefits of Intelligent Automation

McKinsey Global Institute estimates that knowledge work automation tools could take on tasks that would be equal to the output of 110 million to 140 million full-time equivalents (FTEs). They feel it’s possible this incremental productivity could have as much as $5.2 trillion to $6.7 trillion in economic impact annually by 2025.

Other benefits of IT automation, include:

• Increased efficiency: Automation can significantly improve efficiency by automating repetitive tasks, reducing manual effort, and speeding up processes.
• Improved accuracy: Automation can decrease the risk of human error, improving accuracy and reliability of IT processes.
• Better resource utilization: By automating routine tasks, IT staff can focus on more strategic and complex tasks, making better use of their skills and expertise.
• Faster MTTR: Automation reduces the time required to complete tasks, speeding the recovery of applications and services.
• Cost savings: Automation decreases the need for manual labor, saving costs on other operational expenses and allowing staff to work on more strategic projects.
• Scalability: Automation helps organizations scale their operations easily and cost-effectively, by limiting the need for manual analysis.
• Improved customer satisfaction: Automation delivers consistent and high-quality services, leading to increased customer satisfaction.

Overall, Intelligent Automation helps organizations improve their agility, reduce costs, and deliver better quality services to their customers. For more information on how you can use Riverbed’s Intelligent Automation capabilities to improve your IT environment, visit the new Intelligent Automation page.

The digital transformation journey covers four key areas: domain transformation, process transformation, business model transformation, and organizational digital transformation. Riverbed’s Unified Observability platform, which offers complete visibility and actionable insights based on full-fidelity, full stack telemetry, provides companies the launching pad to a successful digital transformation program.

Domain transformation

Domain transformation focuses on redefining an organization’s core functions and offerings in the digital realm. It involves embracing technological advancements to deliver innovative products and services. This may involve leveraging artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, or big data analytics to create new digital experiences for customers.

For example, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are increasingly adopting e-commerce platforms, providing customers with seamless online shopping experiences. This domain transformation enables retailers to reach a global customer base, personalize product recommendations, and streamline logistics, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and driving revenue growth.

Riverbed offers several solutions to reduce the risk of change for domain transformation. For example, Riverbed offers a comprehensive cloud migration offering that helps organizations avoid performance issues, unexpected delays, and unplanned costs. Riverbed provides cloud visibility by providing insights into workload performance in hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, or SaaS environments, and ensuring the security of these workloads. It enables IT Ops teams to plan for seamless application migrations by mapping application dependencies, as well as predicting post-migration performance. Additionally, it helps reduce cloud costs by optimizing bandwidth utilization, resulting in up to 95% reduction in cloud egress costs. By understanding traffic patterns and associated costs, organizations can engage in more efficient planning. Furthermore, Riverbed’s solution optimizes cloud performance by delivering 33 times faster cloud app performance to users regardless of their location.

Whether it’s for cloud, Windows 11 or VDI, Riverbed offers a range of solutions to reduce the risk of IT change for digital transformation initiatives.

Process transformation

Process transformation entails reimagining and optimizing existing business processes by leveraging digital technologies. This involves automating manual tasks, improving efficiency, and enhancing collaboration through digital tools and platforms.

By implementing automation, organizations can automate repetitive tasks, thereby freeing up employees to focus on higher-value activities. Additionally, process transformation involves implementing cloud-based collaboration tools, enabling teams to work seamlessly across geographical boundaries and fostering innovation through enhanced communication and knowledge sharing.

Powered by the Riverbed LogiQ Engine, the Riverbed portfolio uses AI, correlation, and automation to streamline repeatable processes with minimal human intervention, lower costs, and improved user satisfaction. Riverbed uniquely offers broader automation use cases that extract insights across Riverbed monitoring data and existing 3rd party tool silos to enable faster time to resolution. With its powerful automation, analytical and integration capabilities, Riverbed delivers solutions such as automated incident response, intelligent ServiceNow ticketing, automated desktop remediation and intelligent incident response for IT Ops and Service Desk Teams.

Business model transformation

Business model transformation involves reinventing an organization’s fundamental approach to value creation and revenue generation. It requires identifying new opportunities and leveraging digital technologies to deliver unique value propositions to customers.

For instance, the rise of the sharing economy, powered by platforms like Uber and Airbnb, exemplifies business model transformation. These companies disrupted traditional industries by providing on-demand transportation and accommodation services, respectively, using digital platforms that connect customers with providers. By unlocking underutilized resources and delivering convenience and personalized experiences, they created entirely new business models and market opportunities.

Organizational digital transformation

Organizational digital transformation encompasses the cultural and structural changes necessary to support and sustain digital initiatives. It involves fostering a digital mindset across the organization, empowering employees to embrace change, and promoting a culture of innovation.

To successfully navigate organizational digital transformation, organizations must invest in a comprehensive Digital Employee Experience solution. Riverbed’s Aternity provides companies a complete view of the total digital employee experience by tightly correlating both quantitative and qualitative measures of experience. Aternity already offers the deepest quantitative insights, such as application and performance data, into the digital experience and the most powerful insights into the customer experience. With its ability to gauge employee feedback via Aternity Sentiment surveys and the ability to benchmark digital experience against industry peers, Aternity delivers aggregated insights based on application and device performance data along with human reactions, ultimately providing total experience management from an organization’s employees to their customers.

Start your digital transformation journey with Riverbed

By embracing domain transformation, process transformation, business model transformation, and organizational digital transformation, businesses can unlock new opportunities, enhance customer experiences, and stay ahead of the competition.

With its Riverbed and Acceleration offerings, Riverbed can guide companies in their digital transformation projects from start to finish. Before kicking off the project, Riverbed professionals will help organizations ensure that their new investments are targeted and prioritized based on issues that have the most impact on user experience. During the implementation, Riverbed will track progress, provide recommendations on strategy adjustments and provide guidance based on full data visibility.

So, let the digital transformation journey begin, and let innovation and growth propel your organization to new heights.

Identifying areas to improve service and cut costs requires understanding the targets. What does “good” look like? How does your organization compare to industry benchmarks? Where is the “low-hanging fruit?”–the areas within easy reach that can be made better with less effort and investment. Luckily, organizations can rely on data from analysts, industry, and Digital Employee Experience (DEX) management tools like Digital Experience can help them address these challenges.

This blog covers five key end user services metrics and the role that Aternity DEX plays in helping organizations improve them.

Metric 1: Number of contacts per service desk agent

The first data point comes from Gartner’s report, IT Key Metrics Data 2023: End-User Services Measures — IT Service Desk Analysis (subscription required). This research contains high-level Service Desk cost efficiency and staff productivity benchmarks based on data collected throughout 2022 from a global audience of CIOs and IT leaders. It shows that the average service desk agent handled 4,444 contacts per year in 2022, about the same as in 2022. Note the wide distribution in the data by size of the environment. That’s a lot of contacts! The data point out the intense nature of service desk work–especially with increasingly demanding end-users who expect a consumer-like experience for their corporate IT. The data also points out the importance of automated remediation in enabling service desk staff to deal with large numbers of contacts.

How Aternity DEX helps improve Metric 1

The first goal of any service desk is to improve the quality of service delivered in order to reduce the volume of inquiries and issues. The second goal is to reduce the time required to resolve inquiries and issues through self-service and automation. Aternity comes with an extensive library of pre-built automation scripts that can be applied to a single user’s device or to a group of devices. Aternity automated remediation enables IT to automate the recovery actions necessary to resolve the most commonly expected end user issues. Watch this short video to see how Aternity automated remediation enables IT to proactively identify and resolve end user issues.

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Metric 2: Number of devices per digital workplace services staff

The next data point comes from a different Gartner document based on the same 2022 survey. Like the research above, the report IT Key Metrics Data 2023: End-User Services Measures–Digital Workplace Services Analysis (subscription required) contains cost efficiency and staff productivity benchmarks, but this time focused on digital workplace teams. Survey data show that investment in digital workplace services is 8.8% of total IT spending. Similarly, digital workplace services Full Time Equivalents (FTEs) represent 8.4% of total IT FTEs, including contractors. That’s not a lot of staff. Especially when you consider that a digital workplace services staff member supports 394 end user devices on average. Again, that number varies widely based on the size of the organization. Digital workplace teams must support a wide range of devices–laptops, PCs, virtual devices, and company-provided tablets and smart devices. And with macOS devices now reaching 23% in the enterprise, these teams require tools that enable them to support a broad range of vendors.

How Aternity DEX helps improve Metric 2

Automated remediation certainly helps digital workplace teams manage larger numbers of devices per FTE. Aternity also integrates with ServiceNow Incident Management, so that digital workplace staff never have to leave ServiceNow to analyze Aternity device health and performance data or user information when resolving an issue. Not only can they see Aternity digital experience data right in the ServiceNow Incident Management interface, they can also execute Aternity automated remediation actions from there as well. This helps reduce resolution time, improving service, reducing costs, and enabling digital workplace services staff to support a larger environment. Watch this short video to see how it works:

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Metric 3: Task allocation for digital workplace services staff

A second datapoint from the digital workplace services report shows the breakdown of how these staff members spend their time. In 2022, digital workplace teams spent 67% of their time on incident resolution and service requests, up from 63% in 2021. The four percent increase came out of engineering time. The data clearly show that when staff members are overwhelmed with fire-fighting and responding to routine service requests, they have less time to devote to higher value innovation or digital transformation projects.

How Aternity DEX helps improve Metric 3

Aternity provides a variety of capabilities that enable digital workplace teams to quickly identify digital experience improvement areas that will have the biggest payoff. Aternity Experience Insights provide digital workplace services with a list of issues, sorted by impact to employee productivity, so they can identify which improvement projects should be tackled first. Here’s another short video to show how this works:

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Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Index (DXI) automatically identifies digital experience hot spots across your enterprise impacting employees and customers, then sets you on a path to action and improvement. You can establish goals for particular areas, based on industry benchmarks, and prioritize the importance of each area affecting digital experience. You can benchmark your own digital experience against your industry peers and compare the digital experience of different parts of your organization. Aternity DXI can serve as the foundation of your continuous improvement program for digital experience. Here’s how it works:

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Metrics 4 & 5: Wasted SaaS licenses & prevalence of shadow IT

SaaS usage has skyrocketed in organizations of every type. That’s no surprise. In 2008, Gartner reported that worldwide SaaS revenue hit $6.4 billion. This year, SaaS spending is projected to reach $195 billion, up from $167 billion in 2022. And the Gartner End User Services report referenced above shows that in 2022, SaaS comprised 40% of digital workplace services software spending, up from 34% in 2021.

The Zylo 2023 SaaS Management Index Report provides more detail. According to Zylo, the average organization has 291 applications in their SaaS portfolio and spends $50M annually on SaaS. This equates to about $4600 per employee. While companies have committed to SaaS to run their business, Zylo reports significant waste. On average, organizations use only 56% of their SaaS licenses. The remaining 44% are wasted. Do the math. That’s an average of $22M in wasted software spending, every year. 

The Zylo 2023 SaaS Management Index goes further to identify who is buying these SaaS licenses. It’s not IT. IT purchases only 31% of SaaS by spend and 18% by number of applications. Shadow IT is a big issue. While only 6% of application spend is on shadow IT, the category accounts for 37% of total application quantity, according to the report.

How Aternity DEX helps improve Metrics 4 and 5

One of Aternity’s key capabilities is IT asset cost reduction. Aternity automatically discovers every application in use in the enterprise, no matter what type it is. Thick client, web, SaaS, even Shadow IT. Aternity enables you to track actual usage of every type of application in your enterprise, and save money by identifying the software licenses that are unused or under-used.

Get your end user services teams started with Aternity today

You can explore how Aternity enables you to address these key end user services metrics by registering for a Request Demo of Riverbed Aternity. Download our software to understand how our approach to DEX helps you reduce costs, improve productivity, and deliver better customer satisfaction.

Why compliance is a pillar of business resilience

Business resilience is the ability of an organization to withstand, adapt and recover from disruptions and challenges. One critical aspect of business resilience is compliance, which refers to adhering to legal, regulatory, and organizational standards that apply to your business. Compliance plays a crucial role in network performance management and can help organizations fortify their network.

What compliance looks like for your hybrid network depends on your industry. For example, highly-regulated industries like government, medical and financial services usually have more stringent compliance requirements. Careful adherence to security and operational standards, however, is a necessity to some degree in every hybrid network.

When your network fails to meet internal and external compliance requirements, you risk creating security gaps and incurring fines. A hybrid network actively managed to operational and security standards, however, is able to remain compliant even in instances of network disruption. This level of compliance allows organizations to effectively maintain resilience on older applications and services while introducing new technologies.

Compliance can help improve network performance by:

1. Enhancing Security: Compliance regulations often require the implementation of security measures that can help protect against cyber threats and minimize the risk of data breaches. By implementing mandated security measures, organizations can improve network performance by reducing downtime caused by security incidents and ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive data.
2. Reducing Network Downtime: Compliance regulations also require organizations to establish failsafe procedures to ensure business continuity in the event of a cyberattack or system failure. By implementing organization or governmental compliance measures, businesses can reduce network downtime, ensuring that critical business processes can continue even during an outage. This can help improve network performance by minimizing the impact of network disruptions on business operations.
3. Streamlining Network Management: Compliance regulations often require the documentation of network configuration and management processes. By implementing standardized processes and procedures, organizations can streamline network management, making it easier to monitor and troubleshoot issues. This can help improve network performance by reducing the time required to identify and resolve network problems.

Compliance is not just a legal requirement but is also a strategic imperative for businesses looking to optimize their network performance. By prioritizing compliance and implementing the required security measures, policies and procedures, organizations can ensure their networks are performing at their best while also meeting regulatory requirements. This ensures a secure and reliable digital experience for employees and customers, safeguarding people, assets and overall brand equity.

Ensure operational governance and compliance

The Riverbed NPM portfolio helps network teams with oversight through orchestration and data management. Compliance, whether directed by organizational or governmental requirements, is a way to safeguard the network in addition to the business. With new operational governance features like automated orchestration, IT teams can stand up, take down and redeploy Riverbed NPM products to a known safe state seamlessly. Riverbed NPM also now accommodates governmental standards like the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) and Section 508 to ensure uniform practice and accessibility.

Failure to comply with such regulations can result in major fines, loss in revenue and negative customer sentiment. So, whether you are addressing requirements for security, fiduciary, accessibility, or other standards, Riverbed NPM ensures business resilience by leading the industry with regulatory compliance requisites for the modern hybrid network.

For more information on business resilience and how the Riverbed Network Performance Management portfolio can help your organization, please visit this page.

However, even given its critical nature, the reality is IT is a huge expenditure for many businesses and there are often ways to reduce the IT budget without sacrificing digital experience, employee productivity, or customer satisfaction. The tricky part is determining where exactly those cuts can be made and where to start.

In this blog, we’ll provide three tips on reducing your IT costs: how to identify the right devices to upgrade, the importance of IT budgeting, and an IT cost reduction checklist.

Identify the right devices to upgrade

The first step to optimizing IT costs is to evaluate your existing infrastructure. This evaluation will help you determine which devices need to be upgraded or replaced.

Here are three tips to help you identify the right devices to upgrade:

1. Extend the life of devices: While many businesses will replace devices based on their age, you can save money by focusing on device performance. Sometimes older devices are still performing well and don’t have to be replaced, this can result in huge device cost savings.
2. Right size employee devices: Ensure you are providing your employees with appropriately powered devices. When refreshing your employee devices, evaluate their needs, if an employee is primarily using light applications, they may not need a high-powered device. On the other hand, an employee that spends their day using resource intensive applications will need a device that can support their use-case.
3. Identify poorly performing devices: Like extending the life of older devices that are still performing well, some newer devices may not be performing as well as expected. By identifying these devices, you may be able to proactively fix performance issues to save on expenses.

Importance of IT budgeting

Once you have identified the devices that need to be upgraded, the next step is to develop an IT budget. IT budgeting is critical to managing IT costs effectively.

Here are a few key benefits of IT budgeting:

• Optimize software licenses: Evaluate the software you use and the licenses you have. It is possible that you are paying for licenses that aren’t being used, employees are using redundant software, or shadow IT applications are increasing your software costs.
• Assess network infrastructure: Assess the network infrastructure and determine where bottlenecks are occurring. This assessment will help you identify areas where you can either upgrade or streamline network infrastructure to reduce bandwidth costs.
• Evaluate cloud spend: Cloud costs can rise quickly as you move to cloud-native or hybrid cloud environments. It’s critical you closely examine and understand the bills coming from your cloud provider and take steps to minimize unnecessary cloud traffic.
• Prioritize spending: Identify the areas of IT investment that will provide the most ROI and focus on those spending areas first. Measure the impact of planned and ongoing changes on things like the digital experience, application performance, device health, and network performance to ensure you are getting the most bang for your buck.

IT cost reduction checklist

To help you reduce IT costs, follow this quick checklist to get started:

• Align IT with business goals: Ensure your IT investments align with business goals, enabling you to optimize IT costs while driving business growth.
• Determine a device refresh strategy: Identify the devices that need to be replaced, which ones can be fixed, and which ones can continue being used.
• Identify savings opportunities: Look for ways to save on existing spend in areas like software licenses, cloud usage, and network bandwidth.
• Automate IT processes: Automate IT processes to reduce manual labor and increase efficiency.

In conclusion, reducing IT costs is critical for every business, and the key is to optimize IT infrastructure while minimizing unnecessary expenses.

What do you do? Were you prepared for this? What is the financial or reputational impact to the business? Does your network have business resilience?

Why security is a pillar of business resilience

Business resilience is a critical factor in today’s fast-paced and dynamic business environment. Network performance management (NPM) plays a significant role in ensuring business resilience by managing network performance, compliance, and security. Security is one of the most crucial areas of focus for business resilience in the context of NPM. Improving your network’s security, making it more adaptable, can help it respond favorably to a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Not only will you weather potential attacks better, recovering faster and with less damage, but you may be able to avoid others altogether.

According to the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) 2023 Technology Spending Intentions Survey, 65% of IT professionals anticipate spending more on cybersecurity than any other area. Modern networks struggle to keep pace with an ever changing threat landscape. As threats and threat actors evolve and grow more sophisticated, you need a resilient hybrid network that leverages data to help your team find and fix issues faster, remediate threats, and avoid risks.

Taking steps to mitigate security risks

As this is often a daunting task for the IT organization to figure out and manage, NPM gives NetOps and SecOps teams to data and functionality to mitigate security risks. When evaluating potential NPM offerings in the context of security, identify solutions that have the following characteristics:

• In the event of a cyber attack, look for NPM products that are able to be deployed, taken down and restored to a safe state automatically having no impact to the network.
• Look for functionality like intelligent forensic analysis that can automate threat identification and reduce future risks.
• For proactive threat hunting, full-fidelity data capturing every packet, flow, and device metric in your hybrid network without sampling.
• And when finding and fixing security issues faster, look for products with anomaly detection backed by AI/ML to automate data analysis.

To build resilience into security in network performance management, businesses need to take a proactive and holistic approach. Here are some best practices:

1. Develop a comprehensive security strategy: This should include clear objectives, metrics, and processes for monitoring and ensuring security.
2. Invest in the right tools and technologies: Effective security requires the right tools, such as traditional threat prevention tools and methods as well as products that produce forensic telemetry that find threats that traditional security tools might miss. Businesses need to evaluate their needs and choose the tools that best fit their requirements.
3. Monitor and analyze network traffic: By monitoring network traffic, businesses can identify potential security threats and take action before they cause damage.

Engage intelligent security methods against cyber threats

Riverbed NPM products play a strategic role in the overall security of hybrid networks. NPM products need to be seamlessly integrated into an organization’s automated processes to remove the potential risk from manual administration.

With new features like automated orchestration, IT teams have the ability to restore Riverbed NPM products to a known safe state without manual intervention in the event of cyber-attacks or other potential internal or external network threats. In addition, the Riverbed NPM portfolio provides full fidelity data by capturing every packet, flow and device metric without sampling for forensic purposes. This helps identify potential risk exposures that traditional security tools might miss. Solid security competencies drive business resilience by reducing both the risk of negative business impacting events and the magnitude of when they occur.

For more information on business resilience and how the Riverbed Network Performance Management portfolio can help your organization, please visit this page.

Companies can measure digital employee experience (DEX) through various methods, including:

• Surveys: Companies can use surveys to gather feedback from employees about their digital experience, such as the usability of software, availability of technical support, and accessibility of training materials.
• User analytics: User analytics can track how employees interact with digital tools and systems, such as login frequency, time spent on different pages, and click-through rates. This data can provide insights into areas where employees may be experiencing issues or frustrations.
• Performance metrics: Performance metrics, such as productivity, error rates, and customer satisfaction, can be used to assess the impact of digital tools on employee performance.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures the likelihood that an employee would recommend a company’s digital tools to a colleague. This metric can provide insights into the overall satisfaction of employees with the digital tools they are using.

By using these methods, companies can gain a better understanding of their employees’ digital experience and identify areas for improvement to enhance their overall digital employee experience.

What are the pros and cons of the various ways to measure DEX?

Of course, each of these methods of measuring digital employee experience has advantages and disadvantages. The following table summarizes them.

Given the pros and cons of various methods of DEX measurement, organizations should look for a DEX that provides a combination of these approaches. The Aternity Digital Experience Management platform combines objective measures of actual user experience with subjective measures of employee sentiment to provide IT and HR teams with the best of both worlds. Watch this short video to see how Aternity combines qualitative and quantitative measures of DEX to provide the best overall view of employee experience:

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Six business reasons why you should pay attention to DEX

Paying attention to digital employee experience can lead to a more engaged and productive workforce, reduced turnover, and improved business outcomes, making it a critical factor for organizational success in today’s digital age. The business drivers for addressing digital employee experience include the following.

1. Increased Productivity: An employee’s experience with digital tools can have a significant impact on their productivity. When digital tools are easy to use and efficient, employees can work more effectively and efficiently, leading to increased productivity.
2. Improved Employee Engagement: Digital tools that are designed with the employee experience in mind can help foster a sense of engagement and satisfaction among employees. When employees feel that their tools are working for them, they are more likely to feel invested in their work and committed to their organization.
3. Enhanced Collaboration: Digital tools that facilitate collaboration can help employees work together more effectively, regardless of their physical location. This can lead to increased knowledge sharing, better decision-making, and more effective teamwork.
4. Reduced Turnover: A positive digital employee experience can contribute to employee retention. When employees feel that they have the tools and support they need to do their jobs effectively, they are more likely to stay with their organization.
5. Cost Savings: A positive digital employee experience can also result in cost savings for organizations. When digital tools are easy to use and efficient, employees require less support and training, reducing the time and resources required to maintain them.
6. Competitive Advantage: In today’s digital economy, organizations that prioritize digital employee experience are better positioned to attract and retain top talent. By providing employees with the tools and support they need to work effectively, organizations can differentiate themselves from competitors and create a more attractive work environment.

How does digital employee experience work?

Digital employee experience is a subset of employee experience, which includes all aspects of an employee’s experience within an organization. Employee experience includes factors such as work culture, management style, physical workspace, training, opportunities for advancement, and benefits. Digital employee experience focuses specifically on the experience an employee has with digital tools and technologies used in the workplace. This includes ease of use, performance, accessibility, integration with other tools, and training and support for digital tools.

Overall, these factors can have a significant impact on the employee’s digital experience. Organizations that pay attention to these factors and prioritize the employee experience are better positioned to create a more engaged and productive workforce.

What is the difference between DEX and DEM?

Digital employee experience (DEX) and digital experience management (DEM) are related but distinct concepts.

Digital employee experience (DEX) specifically focuses on the experience an employee has with digital tools and technologies used within the workplace. This includes factors such as ease of use, performance, accessibility, integration with other tools, and training and support for digital tools.

Digital experience management (DEM), on the other hand, is a broader concept that encompasses all aspects of the customer or employee’s digital experience with a company. This includes not only digital tools and technologies but also digital marketing, e-commerce, and customer service.

In other words, while DEX focuses specifically on the employee’s experience with digital tools and technologies in the workplace, digital experience management encompasses a wider range of digital experiences that customers or employees may have with a company.

You can access the complimentary Gartner Research document “How to Successfully Deploy a DEX Tool” for further information on implementation and measuring ROI. According to Gartner, many organizations are adopting new DEX tools or evolving existing deployments beyond tactical use case but miss key implementation steps that ensure ongoing ROI. IT leaders can use this research to successfully deploy a new DEX tool or expand the use of existing ones.

Digital Experience Management vs Digital Experience Monitoring

To make things extra confusing, there’s more than one DEM. In addition to digital experience management, there’s digital experience monitoring. The latter category of software involves monitoring the performance and availability of digital systems and applications in order to ensure a high-quality digital experience, for employees and customers. And, in the case of Internet of Things (IoT), even non-human digital agents, like instrumented bridges or gas turbines. Digital experience monitoring focuses specifically on identifying issues and incidents that may affect the digital experience and providing real-time insights and alerts to help resolve them quickly.

What are important digital employee experience tools?

With low unemployment rates, companies are focused on attracting and retaining top talent. So multiple vendors claim capabilities for DEX and DEM. Every company that provides solutions for some type of IT monitoring discusses their products in the context of improving digital experience. When evaluating digital employee experience monitoring products, consider the following capabilities to ensure that the platform meets the needs of your organization.

• Real-time monitoring: Look for a DEX product that provides real-time monitoring of application performance, infrastructure, and user experience. This will allow you to quickly identify and address issues as they occur.
• User-centric analytics: When it comes to digital experience, it’s not about device or application performance metrics. It’s about what humans experience when they use those devices or applications. Look for a DEX product that provides user-centric analytics, such as user journey mapping. This will allow you to understand the end-to-end digital experience of your users and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Multi-channel monitoring: Employees use all types of applications throughout their day. Not just web and mobile, but thick-client applications and those that run on virtual environments too. Look for a product that supports monitoring across multiple channels, including web, mobile, and other digital channels. This will allow you to gain a comprehensive view of the digital experience across all touchpoints.
• Root cause analysis: Monitoring digital experience is only the first step. IT teams must focus on identifying and resolving issues. Look for a DEX product that provides insights into root cause analysis, so you can quickly identify the underlying causes of performance issues and take corrective action.
• Automated remediation: Most leading DEX products provide automated remediation to address the most common user experience issues. This enables IT to resolve issues quickly and automatically, improving service and reducing costs.
• Integration with other tools: IT shops rely the tools from multiple vendors in their operations centers. Look for a DEX product that integrates with other tools in your IT ecosystem, like ServiceNow. This will allow you to gain a comprehensive view of IT performance and ensure that issues are quickly resolved within the workflows you’ve implemented for your teams.
• Proactive identification: Look for a DEM product that provides proactive analytics capabilities, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This will allow you to proactively identify potential performance issues and rapidly resolve the issue before users complain. Riverbed IQ is designed to do just that.

Get started with digital employee experience today

You can explore digital employee experience management now with by registering for a Request Demo of  Aternity. Download our software to understand how our approach to DEX helps you reduce costs, improve productivity, and deliver better customer satisfaction.

A recent Forrester Report states, “while many organizations focus on tools to measure and enhance DEX, the path to success starts long before the tools discussions. Your strategy must embrace a flexible philosophy for happier employees. Then you can explore a variety of technologies to fulfill that vision.” To truly understand the complete digital experience, IT teams need to correlate qualitative employee feedback with full-fidelity quantitative performance metrics.

This is where Aternity Sentiment comes in.

Introducing Aternity Sentiment

Aternity Sentiment empowers IT teams to identify user experience issues, take targeted prescriptive actions, and enhance employee productivity, satisfaction, service quality, and overall business performance. By tightly correlating quantitative and qualitative measures, Aternity Sentiment offers the most comprehensive view of the digital employee experience, setting a new standard for DEX.

Watch the video to learn how Aternity Sentiment empowers total experience management from employees to customers:

Explore benefits of Aternity Sentiment

Empower employees and drive productivity to improve business performance

Aternity Sentiment significantly enhances employee engagement and productivity, leading to improved business performance. By capturing real-time feedback through tailored surveys, Sentiment complements existing Aternity application and device performance data, offering a comprehensive understanding of employee satisfaction. This approach allows IT teams to pinpoint areas that require improvement and implement targeted measures to optimize the digital experience. The use of flexible survey components ensures an accurate assessment of user satisfaction across various devices and locations. Ultimately, this empowers employees and drives productivity, resulting in better overall business performance.

Accelerate digital transformation adoption with targeted employee engagement

Digital transformation is a complex process that requires broad adoption of new technologies and processes across organizational boundaries. Employee acceptance is crucial for successful technology and process changes. Aternity Sentiment facilitates this acceptance by providing workflow integration of qualitative telemetry and analysis in the context of actual user data. Customized branding and precise timing of survey deployment to targeted user groups foster user trust and raise response rates. By engaging employees and addressing their concerns, Aternity Sentiment accelerates the adoption of digital transformation initiatives, ensuring your organization remains competitive and agile.

Deliver total experience management for a comprehensive view of employee and customer experience

 Aternity Sentiment enhances Aternity’s total experience management capabilities, providing a comprehensive view of both employee and customer experiences. Aternity’s unique click-to-render insights, end-user experience data, and user journey analytics offer valuable customer insights. By integrating Sentiment’s qualitative feedback with these capabilities, Aternity enables IT teams to rapidly isolate the cause of delays, uncover hidden issues, and optimize the overall digital experience. This holistic approach ensures a seamless and enjoyable experience for employees and customers alike, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty.

Manage IT more proactively and efficiently with real-time feedback collection

 Aternity Sentiment extends Aternity’s proactive incident management by offering an early warning system through periodic, real-time feedback collection. As a result, IT Operation teams can quickly identify problems before they become systemic, widespread issues. This proactive approach reduces downtime, prevents loss of productivity, and helps maintain a positive user experience. In addition, Sentiment’s trending analysis of qualitative feedback helps identify patterns in user behavior, uncover recurring or common issues, and track service quality improvement efforts. This empowers IT teams to make data-driven decisions and manage resources more efficiently.

Improve IT service quality by implementing experience-level agreements (XLAs)

Aternity Sentiment supports organizations implementing XLA metrics, which focus on employee experience and understanding how IT influences productivity. Unlike traditional SLAs that measure transactional metrics by department, XLAs emphasize the importance of a positive employee experience. With Sentiment’s out-of-the-box and customizable surveys, organizations can analyze survey responses by various attributes and correlate employee satisfaction with device and application performance. This enables IT and LOB leaders to measure the productivity impact of technology changes, determine why a user (or group) may prefer one application over another, and analyze trends in the context of business processes. As a result, leaders can make informed decisions to improve policies, prioritize investments, and identify skills gaps, ultimately enhancing IT service quality and driving better business outcomes.

Sentiment is a game-changer for DEX, providing organizations with the ability to correlate qualitative employee feedback with quantitative performance metrics. This innovative approach empowers IT teams to deliver better digital experiences, drive productivity, and improve overall business performance.

Don’t let your organization fall behind—embrace the future of DEX with Aternity DEM. Learn more by visiting riverbed.com/DEX.

In today’s market, IT Operations teams need fast, context-driven insights to optimize business performance. The increasing complexity of managing incidents in multi-cloud environments, Service Desk and Network Operations teams has resulted in overwhelming volumes of data, alerts and tickets. However, siloed domain-specific monitoring tools fail to provide context or actionable insights. Additionally, limitations in automation scope, diagnostic information gathering and time-consuming steps for ticket documentation negatively affect first level resolution rates and costs, making it hard to effectively prioritize the flood of tickets.

Riverbed’s Unified Observability portfolio solves these problems by delivering full-fidelity telemetry and actionable insights for an organization’s entire technology stack, from applications and infrastructure to end-user experience. With its integration with ServiceNow, the market leader for ITSM platforms, Riverbed provides deep ServiceNow incident context to Service Desk agents and Network Operations teams. Riverbed’s triage, diagnostic and remediation automations streamline ServiceNow ticket creation and escalation.

Riverbed and ServiceNow cross-portfolio integration

Riverbed’s integration with ServiceNow aligns with ServiceNow’s vision of a single, unifying platform for companies advancing digital transformation programs. The combined solution delivers targeted incident response context and automation across Digital Experience Management (DEM), Application Performance Management (APM), and Infrastructure Management (IM) operational data domains. Riverbed offers direct integration within individual Riverbed portfolio products when event-driven ticketing makes sense, and delivers proactive ticketing with built-in intelligence across complex incidents.

Provide targeted, smarter incident response for IT operations teams

With its ability to easily integrate with third party observability tools, Riverbed IQ reduces the noise and eliminates the source of duplicated and false-positive ticketing, significantly reducing the volume of tickets created in ServiceNow. It replicates advanced investigative processes by correlating operational data across public cloud, private cloud, and data center infrastructure layers, looking for anomalous behaviors indicative of an emerging incident. When Riverbed IQ detects an anomaly, it automatically performs an investigation. If the behavior is identified as important based on anomaly thresholds, it creates a ServiceNow ticket with the right severity and assigns it to the right team, providing supporting incident context, cutting through the noise caused by event-based ticketing.

Empower L1 service desk agents to resolve issues faster

Riverbed Aternity provides Service Desk teams with extensive insights and tools to troubleshoot issues faster, make accurate decisions and resolve incidents without escalation. Aternity monitors end user devices, correlates device and application performance with user behavior, and identifies potential issues with the end user digital experience. When a degraded end-user experience issue is detected, Aternity automatically creates a ServiceNow incident and embeds employee-specific insights within the ServiceNow ITSM UI. With just one click, Service Desk agents can remotely perform investigative actions on any device to accelerate their troubleshooting.

Deliver higher-order incident response for network operations

Together with Riverbed IQ, the RIverbed Network Performance Management (NPM) suite revamps the reactive stance of NOCs, involving manual correlation of event data, by automatically correlating full-fidelity operational data, not just events, and surfacing actionable situations as ServiceNow tickets. Rivered IQ zeroes in on the root cause of a problem and provides the specific context immediately upon ServiceNow ticket creation. Riverbed offers end-to-end visibility and embeds actionable insights directly into the ServiceNow ticket, reducing escalations.

Riverbed’s Unified Observability portfolio, integrated with ServiceNow, empowers IT Operations teams to proactively resolve issues and optimize business performance. By delivering targeted incident response context and automation across operational data domains, Riverbed reduces noise and provides deep insights, enabling IT teams to resolve issues faster and reduce costs.

Key components of DEX

A comprehensive approach to Digital Employee Experience involves five critical components:

1. Application performance and usability: Ensuring applications are fast, reliable, and user-friendly to support employees in their day-to-day tasks.
2. Device performance and reliability: Providing employees with devices that are high-performing, dependable, and tailored to their specific needs.
3. Connectivity and network performance: Facilitating fast and stable network connections that allow employees to work efficiently and collaborate seamlessly.
4. Workspace environment and collaboration tools: Creating a digital environment that promotes effective communication and collaboration among team members.
5. Security and data protection: Implementing robust security measures to safeguard sensitive company and employee information.

The importance of DEM solutions

To effectively manage and enhance DEX, Digital Experience Management (DEM) platforms are the vital tool in that technology toolbox for IT leaders. This is why organizations that are looking to improve their employee experience partner with Riverbed to implement Riverbed Aternity DEM across their enterprise. Aternity provides visibility into the actual user experience of performance of applications, devices, and networks, enabling IT teams to proactively identify and address issues impacting employee experience.

Overall, DEM solutions like Riverbed Aternity play a crucial role in improving DEX by:

• Gaining real user insights into employee experiences with applications and devices
• Proactively addressing performance issues to maintain a seamless, productive work environment
• Optimizing IT infrastructure and resources to support employee productivity
• Evaluating the impact of IT initiatives on employee experience and business results

Organizations looking to improve their DEX should adopt these four best practices:

1. Establish a baseline: Measure the current state of application performance, device health, and network connectivity to create a foundation for understanding and improving employee experience.
2. Identify and address bottlenecks: Use data from DEM solutions like Aternity and direct employee feedback to proactively resolve performance issues and maintain a seamless, productive work environment for employees.
3. Prioritize user-centric initiatives: Focus on improving employee experiences with digital tools and resources, ensuring your organization’s technology investments yield maximum returns in terms of employee satisfaction and productivity.
4. Measure and monitor: Regularly measure and monitor DEX metrics to track progress and ensure continuous improvement. Encourage employee feedback and promote a culture of open communication to identify areas for improvement and drive positive change within the organization.

Leveraging Riverbed Aternity for enhanced DEX

Being in Product Marketing at Riverbed, I’ve seen firsthand how our solutions have helped organizations measure and optimize employee experiences. Riverbed Aternity DEM offers valuable insights into employee interactions with applications and devices. It measures the employee’s true, actual experience, enabling IT teams to proactively identify and resolve performance issues, optimize IT infrastructure and resources, and measure the impact of IT initiatives on employee experience and business outcomes.

By leveraging Aternity’s DEM capabilities, organizations can:

• Better understand the end-user perspective and identify opportunities for improvement
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement focused on enhancing employee experiences
• Streamline IT decision-making based on accurate and actionable insights
• Enhance collaboration and communication across teams and departments

Watch Video

As remote and hybrid work environments continue to become the norm, organizations must prioritize digital employee experience. By implementing a robust DEM solution like Riverbed Aternity and following best practices, organizations can unlock the full potential of their workforce, driving overall business success.

Emphasizing the importance of DEX in decision-making processes and technology investments will lead to a more engaged, productive, and satisfied workforce, which in turn positively impacts customer experiences and business outcomes. By focusing on continuous improvement and fostering a culture of open communication, organizations can stay ahead of the curve and thrive in today’s rapidly changing digital landscape.

Forrester recently published a best practices report, Make Digital Employee Experience the Centerpiece of Your Digital Workplace Strategy, where they emphasize how optimizing the digital employee experience (DEX) has become a critical factor for today’s diverse, hybrid workforce, and how improving employee experiences translates to better business outcomes. Forrester states that “while many organizations focus on tools to measure and enhance DEX, the path to success starts long before the tools discussions. Your strategy must embrace a flexible philosophy for happier employees. Then you can explore a variety of technologies to fulfill that vision.”

A comprehensive DEX solution like Riverbed Aternity is crucial for improving employee experiences and driving success in hybrid and remote work settings. You can download a complimentary copy of the Forrester Report here.

End User Experience Management is an important consideration for businesses of all sizes, as it can have a significant impact on the productivity of the workforce, the satisfaction of customers, and ultimately the success of the organization. At its core, EUEM is focused on providing a positive experience for end users, whether they are employees, customers, or partners. This can involve a range of capabilities, including monitoring, analytics, and implementing strategies for improving the performance of system, application, and devices.

As clear as this sounds, vendors and thought leaders in the market make it confusing by using a variety of related terms to describe this goal. Digital Experience Monitoring, Digital Experience Management, and Digital Employee Experience Management are all different names for similar categories of software. Review the Gartner Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring for a good overview of representative vendors.

The role of monitoring in EUEM

Monitoring is a key foundational element of End User Experience Management. This involves tracking the performance of various components of the technology environment that affect user experience, including devices, servers, applications, and network resources. By collecting data on these elements, and correlating them together, businesses can gain insight into the root causes of performance issues negatively affecting end user experience and identify opportunities for improvement.

For example, if users are experiencing slow load times when accessing a particular application, IT can use end user experience monitoring tools to track the performance of the application and identify any bottlenecks or other issues that may be causing the problem. Products like our Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Management Platform enable IT to isolate the source of slowness to the employee device, the network, or the back-end application service. IT can then further investigate the root cause and take appropriate action to improve it. It’s important to note that monitoring metrics that indicate the performance of devices, systems, and applications is necessary, but not sufficient for effective end user experience management. Device performance management is not the same as end user experience management. It’s just one of the factors.

How analytics drives End User Experience Management

Another important element of EUEM is analytics. By collecting and analyzing data on user activity and system performance, businesses can gain insight into how their technology systems are being used and identify opportunities for improvement. This can involve analyzing data on user behavior, such as how often they access particular applications or the application response time they experience when performing certain tasks within a business-critical application.

Most EUEM products enable IT to proactively identify and address issues before they become major problems. By monitoring system performance and analyzing user behavior, businesses can identify potential issues early on and take steps to prevent them from causing significant disruptions. Products like Riverbed Aternity contain automated remediation capabilities to address the most commonly expected end user issues. With automated remediation, IT can often remedy an end user experience issue even before employees notice. Watch this short video to see automated remediation in action:

What is an example of end user experience?

The performance of an application or website is a common example of end user experience that everyone is familiar with. End users expect applications and websites to load quickly and be responsive. If an application takes a long time to load or is slow to respond to user inputs, user experience suffers. This can have a major impact on the business. For example, data from Hobo shows the following:

• The ideal website load time for mobile sites is 1-2 seconds.
• 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load.
• A 2-second delay in load time resulted in abandonment rates of up to 87%.

Other technical factors that can impact the end user experience include network connectivity, server availability, and the quality of the user interface. For example, if a user is accessing an application over a slow or unreliable network connection, this can lead to poor performance and frustration. Similarly, if a server is experiencing high levels of traffic, this can lead to slow load times and other performance issues.

The challenge for IT is that with so many employees working from home, factors such as Wi-Fi signal strength and ISP bandwidth and performance also affect end-user experience. But those factors are outside of the direct control of IT. IT requires a monitoring system like that ingests telemetry from all across the IT environment, then analyzes them to identify issues.

Why is improving end user experience important?

Using End User Experience Management to provide a seamless and responsive user experience enables businesses to improve their workforce productivity and customer satisfaction. Benefits include the following:

For employees:

• Increased productivity: If employees have access to technology systems that are fast, reliable, and easy to use, they can perform their tasks more efficiently, which improves productivity.
• Reduced frustration and stress: If employees are able to use technology systems without experiencing performance issues, they are likely to feel less frustrated and stressed, which can improve morale and job satisfaction.
• Improved job performance and retention: Employees who are satisfied with their technology systems are more likely to stay with their current employer.

For consumers:

• Enhanced satisfaction and loyalty: If consumers have a positive experience when using a company’s technology systems, they are more likely to be satisfied with the company’s products or services and become loyal customers.
• Increased sales and revenue: Customers who have a positive experience are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the company to others, which can lead to increased sales and revenue.
• Improved brand reputation: Companies that prioritize end user experience and provide a positive experience for their customers are likely to develop a strong reputation for quality and customer service, which can help attract new customers and retain existing ones.

How has hybrid work changed the importance of end user experience management?

The prevalence of hybrid or remote work has increased the importance of end user experience management for several reasons:

Increased reliance on technology

With more employees working remotely, businesses are relying on technology systems to facilitate communication, collaboration, and productivity. With this, end user experience has become even more critical, as employees need technology systems that are fast, reliable, and easy to use in order to perform their tasks effectively.

Greater complexity

Hybrid or remote work environments can be more complex than traditional office environments, with employees accessing systems and applications from multiple locations and devices. This added complexity can make it more difficult to manage and optimize the end user experience.

Heightened security concerns

Remote work also brings with it heightened security concerns, as employees may be accessing sensitive company data from unsecured networks or devices. Ensuring a positive end user experience while maintaining robust security measures requires businesses to find a balance between security and ease of use.

Increased competition for talent

With the rise of remote work, businesses are no longer limited to hiring employees from their local area. This means that businesses are competing with a wider range of companies for top talent, and end user experience can be a key factor in attracting and retaining employees in a low unemployment market.

Here’s an overview of how Riverbed helps address these hybrid work challenges.

Five steps to improve end user experience

Improving end user experience can be challenging when IT budgets are tight. However, there are several practical ways that businesses can improve end user experience while watching expenses.

1. Conduct an end user experience assessment: Assessing current systems and processes can help identify areas of inefficiency or frustration for end users and can provide insights into how to improve the overall experience. Companies use periodic surveys to gather employee experience data, but they can also do the same with their EUEM tools.
2. Prioritize user feedback: User feedback is an invaluable tool for improving end user experience. By prioritizing user feedback and making changes based on that feedback, businesses can demonstrate that they value their employees’ and customers’ feedback.
3. Optimize existing systems: Often, businesses have existing systems and processes that can be optimized to improve end user experience. This might include removing unnecessary steps from a process, streamlining workflows, or optimizing the performance of existing technology systems.
4. Implement self-service tools: Self-service tools, such as knowledge bases or chatbots, can help reduce frustration for end users by providing them with quick and easy access to information or assistance. These tools can be relatively inexpensive to implement and can help improve end user experience by reducing wait times and increasing accessibility.
5. Provide training and support: Providing training and support to end users can also help improve the overall experience. This might include offering training sessions on new systems or processes or providing dedicated support personnel to help troubleshoot technical issues.

Overall, improving end user experience doesn’t necessarily require a large investment of money. By prioritizing user feedback, optimizing existing systems, implementing self-service tools, and providing training and support, businesses can make meaningful improvements to the end user experience even in restricted budget environments.

Take the first step to better end user experience now

You can explore end user experience management now by registering for a Request Demo of Riverbed Aternity. Download our software to understand how our approach to end user experience management helps you reduce costs, improve productivity, and deliver better customer satisfaction.

With network performance and user experience as mission critical initiatives, IT teams are constantly under the microscope. When NetOps teams lack visibility into their applications, servers, and cloud-native environments, they’re unable to correctly troubleshoot network issues like unchecked security threats, application slowdowns and other performance issues. For hybrid networks, a lack of visibility often stems from insight latency. The speed and clarity with which insights are delivered can be the difference between prompt action and a large outage.

Why performance is a pillar of business resilience

Little do people know what it takes to keep these modern hybrid networks going! Performance across the network is critical. This makes performance a key pillar of business resilience. Business resilience is the ability of a company to adapt and recover quickly from unexpected disruptions.

In today’s digital world, network performance management (NPM) plays a crucial role in ensuring business resilience. By effectively managing network performance, companies can build a more resilient network infrastructure that can withstand unexpected disruptions and provide a consistent user experience.

Effective monitoring, testing, and optimization of the network can help identify and resolve performance issues, such as bottlenecks, latency, or packet loss. Ensuring that the network is performing optimally can help avoid disruptions and provide a consistent user experience.

Elevate your network’s visibility and performance

The Riverbed NPM portfolio delivers increased business resilience, enabling and accelerating operational transformation from legacy to hybrid and multi-cloud networks. Our solution helps IT teams adapt to disruptions while maintaining continuous operations and safeguarding people, assets, and overall brand equity.

Unlike other NPM solutions, Riverbed NPM delivers granular visibility across network domains with full-fidelity data, extracted from packets, flows and device metrics giving insight across hybrid environments. With new performance enhancements like increased data capabilities, faster processing rates and third-party vendor support, Riverbed NPM sees more telemetry than ever before allowing real time visibility across networks, servers, applications, and the cloud.

New Riverbed NPM performance enhancements help address growing network demands and mitigate compromising network events by delivering full fidelity insights at lightning-fast speed to NetOps and SecOps teams. Corporate mandates require an IT environment that is nimble to accommodate new business requirements, particularly now that networks are evolving beyond the data center. The shift to complex, multi-cloud networks is driving the need for greater scalability, accelerated insights, integration enhancements and increased performance.

For more information on business resilience and how the Riverbed Network Performance Management portfolio can help your organization, please visit this page.

IT teams are constantly spinning plates. It’s only a matter of time before something breaks.

Keep the plates spinning with NPM

So, what can you do to keep the network spinning?  Strengthen your network to be more adaptable and responsive, delivering a better digital experience to your organization’s employees and users. This is business resilience.

A solid prevention or contingency plan for a possible damaging event truly tests the mettle of IT teams. Readiness for all possible negative scenarios seems an impossible task. Business resilience is crucial for companies to adapt and recover quickly from unexpected disruptions, such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, or economic downturns.

In today’s digital world, network performance management (NPM) plays a critical role in ensuring that objective. By effectively managing network performance, compliance, and security, companies can build a more resilient network infrastructure.

Three focus areas for business resilience

Network performance management is the process of monitoring and optimizing the performance of a company’s network infrastructure. Here are the key areas of focus for business resilience in the context of network performance management:

Performance

Performance is the cornerstone of network performance management. Effective monitoring, testing, and optimization of the network can help identify and resolve performance issues, such as bottlenecks, latency, or packet loss. Ensuring that the network is performing optimally can help avoid disruptions and provide a consistent user experience.

Compliance

In today’s regulatory environment, compliance is a critical concern for businesses. Compliance requirements vary depending on the industry and the region, but they all aim to protect the privacy and security of sensitive data. NPM can help ensure compliance with organizational or governmental regulations by providing visibility into network traffic, monitoring access controls, and delivering oversight and data management.

Security

With the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks, security is a top priority for businesses. A security breach can lead to data theft, financial losses, and reputational damage. NPM can help secure the network by monitoring for unusual traffic patterns, provides forensic analysis, and delivers granular network data for quick response and troubleshooting.

How to build resilience into NPM

To build resilience into network performance management, businesses need to take a proactive and holistic approach. Here are five best practices:

1. Develop a comprehensive network performance management strategy: This should include clear objectives, metrics, and processes for monitoring and optimizing network performance, compliance, and security.
2. Invest in the right tools and technologies: Effective network performance management requires the right tools, such as network monitoring hardware/software that focusses on packet capture, flow monitoring and device metrics. Businesses need to evaluate their needs and choose the tools that best fit their requirements.
3. Automate routine tasks: Automation can help reduce manual effort (and mistakes from human intervention) and improve efficiency. This includes automating network configuration and patch management, as well as implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect and resolve issues.
4. Build a culture of security: Security is everyone’s responsibility. Businesses need to educate employees on security best practices, establish clear security policies and procedures, and regularly test and audit their security measures.
5. Continuously monitor and adapt: The network environment is constantly changing. Businesses need to continuously monitor network performance, compliance, and security, and adapt their strategies and tools to keep up with the evolving threat landscape.

So in order to keep the plates spinning, NPM has to be a critical component of business resilience. By focusing on performance, compliance, and security, businesses can build a more resilient network infrastructure that can withstand unexpected disruptions and provide a secure and consistent user experience.

For more information on business resilience and how the Riverbed Network Performance Management portfolio can help your organization, please visit this page.

Get 30k foot view of customer experience

If the telemetry coming back in from the ATM fleet in the form of logs, metrics or traces is still being analyzed in an ad-hoc manner, that is almost like taking a step back in time by at least a decade. Once affected by an incident, without a holistic observability, understanding the underlying root cause of degraded user experience is wrapped in a few assumptions and incoherent analytics or trends.

Compare that, for instance with a screen like below, summarizing the customer experience across the entire ATM fleet, out-of-the-box. To maximize the value of your screen real estate while providing dashboards with high level view of system wide health, Riverbed Aternity diligently distills various analytics and metrics from the entire ATM fleet into a handful of carefully curated numbers, like UXI Score. The UXI Score incorporates health indicators like Crashes, Hanging, and Wait Time.

Riverbed Aternity also captures and provides the following categories of raw of ATM Observability metrics, which are further heuristically distilled into various cocktail metrics like UXI User Experience Index:

• ATM Performance and Stability
• Application Performance and Stability
• Customer Activity Performance

Ultimately, even the most well-provisioned ATM hardware and connectivity can leave gaps in customer experience. That is because modern applications running in production are themselves at mercy of layers of unpredictability. From bugs in the operating system to a manual configuration error in the networking components, the root causes of user performance degradation has many areas from which to sprout. It is therefore very important that measurements of the user experience is a first-class citizen in your observability tools and practices.

Below is an example of another real-time dashboard with a list of each activity performed by users overall. With each activity, we also showcase the breakdown of delays split by network component, server component and user component.

To get you the highest fidelity customer experience data points, Riverbed Aternity breaks down each customer’s transactions by activities. The following diagram clearly shows the relation between a customer’s transactions and what Aternity classifies as activities:

Diagnosing problems in the customer journey

Observability with Riverbed Aternity includes monitoring so diagnosing problems with a poorly performing ATM and looking through each and every transaction performed on it is straightforward. And yes, as you hover over each activity a tool-tip pops up, as outlined in green below, in which each transaction showcases a split of response time by client time, network time and backend time.

Inspect all transactions for an ATM

We can even further deep-dive into individual transaction for a timeline-based view of the performance of transactions. In the image below, we focus on a single activity, Insert Card. It is clear that this transaction typically completes under 20 seconds, as indicated by the highlighted band close to the x-axis. However, there are various outliers, some of them showing exacerbated network time. Once such data-point is highlighted and a detailed tool-tip shows its full details:

Identifying the frequency and trend of these outliers can help narrow down the conditions which cause such degraded experience—a more data driven approach to solving performance problems in your ATM fleet.

Analyze transaction performance

Which machines from the fleet are taking the longest to process this transaction? To answer such questions we can develop further customized dashboards like the one below where we list each activity that users perform sorted by the average time taken on that ATM. This identifies consistently poor performing ATMs where troubleshooting should be prioritized.

Analyze SLA compliance

In Riverbed Aternity, we can also set compliance SLA thresholds for ATM transactions and identify which cities and geographies which are consistently non-compliant with SLAs. The violating transactions are clearly listed along with their average, minimum and maximum values. We can then troubleshoot the poorly performing transactions in their geographies to understand how the customer experience can be improved, whether by improving network time or device or back-end performance.

Visit this page to learn why Riverbed Aternity is the right solution for your customer experience monitoring, whether it is at ATMs, web or desktop.

The same things can happen with Application Performance. How do you you know that your network and applications are going to give you the reliability and performance your business needs? Just like a plumber could have helped us find out where the bottlenecks were before disaster struck, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) can help ensure you identify where your applications are going to be slowed down.

Get a complete view of Application Performance

APM helps organizations improve user experiences by tracking key software application performance metrics using monitoring software and telemetry data. Without Application Performance Monitoring, teams struggle to identify and resolve the numerous problems that can arise, causing customers to become frustrated and abandon the app altogether, impacting revenue and brand image.

Application monitoring is a great way to gain a full view into the user experience, application performance, and database availability. Businesses of all sizes use various applications daily for different processes and need to deploy tools throughout the application environment and supporting infrastructure to monitor real-time performance. To get a complete view of application performance, you need to monitor the following:

• Digital/user experience encompassing both real-user and simulated experience for assessing performance in production and non-production environments. This type of monitoring collects performance metrics, including load time, response time, uptime, and downtime, by analyzing the user interface on the end-user device.
• Application performance monitoring involves overseeing the complete application and infrastructure. This comprises the application framework, database, operating system, middleware, web application server and user interface, CPU usage, and disk capacity. Monitoring applications at this level can help identify code segments that could be causing performance issues and check the availability of software and hardware components.
• Database availability monitoring helps assess the performance of SQL queries or procedures and the availability of the database.

But is it any different for cloud-native applications? The rise of cloud-native applications poses several challenges despite their well-established benefits. Complex applications, composed of numerous microservices, generate huge amounts of data, which needs to be centrally managed and analyzed to proactively identify performance issues. The speed at which data is generated is also a challenge. These factors have made application performance management more challenging in cloud-native environments.

The many benefits of APM

A good Application Performance Monitoring solution offers many capabilities, such as:

• Dynamically maintain real-time awareness of application and infrastructure components through automatic discovery and mapping.
• Gain end-to-end visibility into the application’s transactional experience to comprehend its impact on business outcomes and user experience.
• Monitor mobile and desktop applications on browsers to track user experience across different platforms.
• View root-cause and impact analysis to identify performance issues and their impact on business outcomes for faster and reliable incident resolution.
• Integrate and automate service management tools and third-party sources to scale up or down with the infrastructure.
• Analyze the impact on user experience and its impact on business KPIs.
• Monitor endpoint devices and application performance issues.
• Monitor virtual desktop infrastructure to maximize employee productivity.

Clearly, businesses can benefit in many ways by gaining visibility and intelligence into application performance and its dependencies. Real-time monitoring helps detect performance issues before they affect real users, expanding the technical and business benefits list, which includes:

• Increased application stability and uptime
• A reduced number of performance incidents
• Faster resolution of performance problems
• Improved infrastructure utilization

Investing in a good Application Performance Monitoring solution ensures reliable intelligence and insights that enable teams to align faster, and identify and isolate issues for faster problem resolution. Performance monitoring has rapidly expanded to encompass a broad range of technologies and use cases. Modern applications, though built using microservices, are highly complex and run in containerized environments hosted across multiple cloud services, making it even more essential to get end-to-end visibility.

And just like good storm water drainage, you’ll get the performance when you really need it.

Monitoring refers to the practice of collecting and analyzing data from network, applications, infrastructure, and user experience data to detect issues or anomalies. Monitoring typically involves setting up threshold alerts to notify operators or developers when something goes wrong. The goal of monitoring is to provide insight into availability, performance, and usage.

Observability takes monitoring a step further by emphasizing the importance of understanding the internal workings of a system, rather than just monitoring its inputs and outputs. Observability involves collecting and analyzing data at a deeper level and requires full-fidelity cross-domain data to gain a holistic view of system behavior. The aim of observability is to enable proactive detection and resolution of issues, rather than just reactive problem-solving.

In short, observability and monitoring are like different sides of the same coin. Monitoring provides a basic level of visibility into a system, while visibility provides a more comprehensive view of performance behavior. Observability takes this even further by emphasizing the need to understand the internal workings of a system to improve its overall performance and reliability.

What is observability?

Observability is a concept used in various fields, including engineering, computer science, and systems analysis, among others. It refers to the ability to understand and analyze the internal workings of a system or process based on the data and information that it produces. Essentially, it is the degree to which we can observe and measure what is happening within a system.

In computer science, observability is often associated with software and application development. It involves the ability to monitor and debug complex software systems by collecting and analyzing data from various sources, such as application logs, metrics, and traces. By doing so, developers can identify and resolve issues within the software and improve its overall quality and performance.

It expands the concept of observability to all IT systems, including the network, infrastructure, applications and user experience. It leverages full-fidelity data, analytics and correlation, and intelligent automation to gather contextual data that supports fast identification and resolution of performance and security issues.

Overall, observability is a crucial concept that enables us to gain insight into the internal workings of complex systems and processes, which can help us improve their performance, reliability, and overall effectiveness.

What is monitoring?

Performance monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing the performance metrics of a system or process, such as a computer system, network, or application, to ensure that it meets the required performance levels or SLAs (service level agreements). It involves monitoring various metrics, such as response time, throughput, and error rates, and comparing them against predetermined benchmarks or thresholds.

The goal of performance monitoring is to identify and diagnose performance issues, such as slow response times, high resource utilization, or system crashes, and take appropriate action to resolve them. This can involve adjusting system configurations, upgrading hardware or software components, or optimizing code or algorithms.

Performance monitoring is critical for ensuring the efficient and effective functioning of systems and processes, as well as for ensuring customer satisfaction and maintaining business continuity. It is commonly used in industries such as IT, telecommunications, finance, healthcare, and manufacturing to monitor and optimize the performance of critical systems and applications.

Observability and monitoring: what’s the difference?

Observability and monitoring are both important concepts in IT operations, but they have slightly different meanings.

Monitoring generally refers to the process of collecting data about a system, such as its performance, availability, and usage, and using that data to identify and diagnose problems or to optimize performance. Monitoring is typically done using specialized telemetry that collects and analyzes data from various sources, such as from the network or applications.

Observability, on the other hand, is a more holistic concept that refers to the ability to understand and reason about a system’s behavior and performance from its outputs. An observable system is one that provides enough information to allow IT to understand how it is behaving and to diagnose problems more easily. It typically has a well-defined interface that allows IT to collect and analyze data about its behavior.

In summary, monitoring is a subset of observability, where monitoring is a way to gather data about a system, while observability is the ability to reason about that system from its data outputs.

What are the benefits of observability?

There are several benefits of observability, including:

1. Faster problem detection: With observability, it becomes easier to detect problems as they occur, rather than waiting for user complaints or failures. This can help reduce downtime and improve overall reliability.
2. Faster problem resolution: Once a problem is detected, observability tools can help pinpoint the root cause of the issue. Riverbed Unified Observability uses intelligent automation to gather supporting evidence and context. This reduces the time it takes to resolve the problem and get the system back up and running.
3. Better performance: By monitoring key metrics and indicators, observability can help identify performance areas that are not optimal. This can help improve performance of networks, applications, and user experience and prevent potential issues before they occur.
4. Improved collaboration: Observability tools can provide visibility into the internal state of a system to multiple teams across an organization. This can improve collaboration between teams and help everyone work towards a common goal of improving performance and reliability.
5. Better customer experiences: By detecting and resolving issues faster, observability can help improve users’ digital experiences, which leads to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What is Riverbed Unified Observability?

Riverbed IQ, a SaaS-delivered Unified Observability service, surfaces impactful issues with context to solve problems fast. It leverages key metrics across a full range monitoring telemetry—from the network, infrastructure, applications, and end users—to provide the foundation of unified observability. It applies a diversity of analytics and correlates across five dimensions to group related indicators into a single incident for more accurate alerting and faster problem identification. It then employs intelligent automation that replicates the best practices of IT experts to gather evidence, build context, and set priorities. As a result, IT can fix problems faster and more efficiently.

For more information on Unified Observability and monitoring, click here.

In today’s digital age, digital transformation (DX) is essential for businesses to remain competitive and sustainable. However, many organizations need to remember that the success of their DX initiatives depends on the experience of their employees. If employees struggle with user experience (UX) issues, the organization’s transformation efforts are bound to fail.

In this blog, we will explore three reasons why a solid UX is crucial for any DX initiative to succeed.

The path to digital transformation

To start developing your digital transformation strategy, assess your company’s current state by identifying the processes, technologies, and business models currently in use. From there, you can identify areas that need improvement and define your goals while identifying your target audience. Mapping out user journeys and all touchpoints is also crucial. Evaluating the technology landscape and noting any gaps or inefficiencies is key.

Next, it is important to create a digital transformation team responsible for driving change and transformation across the company. This team should be cross-functional and develop a roadmap for implementing changes. It is essential they continuously monitor and improve the digital transformation process as it unfolds, paying special attention to these three areas of the digital transformation strategy:

1. Productivity: Productivity is significantly impacted when employees struggle with poor UX. Today’s workforce uses more applications, systems, and tools than ever before, and adding layers of new tools and workflows can further complicate matters. It is important to determine what will work within legacy systems and to keep out the things that won’t.
2. Employee Experience: Operational excellence is directly affected by poor UX. As employee turnover and recruitment goals increase, an intuitive UX is key for existing and new employees to handle the IT overhaul. In today’s remote and hybrid work environments, a streamlined UX can help ease the transition and eliminate organizational silos. This allows employees to collaborate and fill institutional gaps necessary for operational excellence.
3. Security: Security is significantly impacted by poor UX. A strong UX makes it easier for people to follow security measures, as it is not practical to expect employees to follow best practices if they get in the way of their daily responsibilities. Security should be baked into all systems from the start, and automation can help ensure that access is granted only for the duration of the employee’s employment. Automation can also help organizations identify abnormal behavior and spot potential problems before they escalate.

Managing change made easy

Managing change is a critical component of successful digital transformation, and a vital part of this is ensuring a positive employee experience. Here are some additional strategies for improving change management and employee experience:

• Develop a change management plan: Create a detailed plan for managing the changes that come with digital transformation. This should include a timeline, a list of key stakeholders, and a communication strategy to keep employees informed and engaged throughout the process.
• Provide training and support: Make sure your employees have the resources they need to succeed in their new roles. This might include training on new technologies and processes and ongoing support to answer questions and troubleshoot issues.
• Foster a culture of collaboration: Encourage collaboration and open communication among teams to build a sense of community and ensure everyone feels included in the process. This can reduce resistance to change and increase overall employee engagement.
• Collect feedback and make adjustments: Monitor the progress of your digital transformation and collect feedback from employees to identify areas where improvements can be made. Use this feedback to make adjustments and refine your change management plan.
• Recognize and reward success: Celebrate successes and recognize employees who have gone above and beyond to support the digital transformation initiative. This can help build momentum and foster a positive employee experience.

Ultimately, a successful digital transformation requires a holistic approach that considers both the technological and human aspects of the process. By focusing on improving change management and employee experience, organizations can create a culture that supports ongoing innovation and growth.

Quantify cost savings with Riverbed Aternity DXI

The Riverbed Aternity’s Digital Experience Index (DXI) is a metric used to measure the overall digital experience of end-users, such as employees, customers, and partners, who interact with an organization’s digital services and applications. The DXI provides a single score that represents the overall satisfaction of end users with their digital experience and breaks it down across five main categories, namely:

• Critical Business Applications
• Collaboration Tools
• Devices
• Productivity Tools
• Other Applications

By leveraging DXI, organizations can quickly identify areas where end users are experiencing issues or frustrations with digital services and applications, therefore taking steps to improve their digital experience. This can ultimately lead to increased productivity, improved customer satisfaction and better business outcomes, all of which has a direct, positive impact on cost savings. Check out this video to see how DXI helps companies along their digital transformation journey.

Besides overall DXI, another key metric that Riverbed Aternity measures is User Experience Index (UXI). UXI provides real-time insights into the digital experience of the company’s end users. It tracks and measures various metrics, such as application page load time, hang and wait time, as well as crashes and errors, to provide a holistic view of the user experience. Based on UXI, companies can quickly visualize and identify areas of improvement in their digital offerings and take proactive measures to optimize the user experience. This can result in quantifiable cost savings, as improvement in user experience can reduce the amount of time and resources required to address the issues and improve productivity.

Additionally, by measuring and monitoring the impact of user experience changes, companies can identify the most effective strategies to reduce IT spending. These strategies include going beyond the age of the devices to analyze which devices are no longer delivering an adequate user experience and selectively refreshing those devices, identifying and eliminating under-used software licenses and streamlining cloud network bandwidth cost while optimizing performance.

Realize productivity gains from effective change management

By utilizing Riverbed Aternity’s comprehensive monitoring and analytics capabilities, companies can identify and measure the impact of changes on employee productivity in real-time, as well as before and after the change. This enables companies to make informed decisions about the timing, scope and impact of changes, minimizing disruption and ensuring the successful adoption of new processes. Aternity can also help companies proactively identify and mitigate potential issues before they impact productivity, reducing the risk of unexpected downtime and delays. By leveraging Aternity’s advanced reporting and analytics features, companies can easily track and measure the results of their change management initiatives, identifying areas for improvement and optimizing their processes for even more significant productivity gains in the future.

In the below example, let’s look at a real-life use case of an Aternity customer, where productivity improved as user experience improved, as a result of a positive backend application change.

Prior to the change, users complained about latency and hang time while loading a critical business application mainly used to create sales orders and retrieve business reports. As we can see from the Response Time column, there were a lot of pages with higher than 4 seconds response time on average, mostly spent on backend processing, as highlighted in dark blue. Some of the activities recorded had close to 10 seconds response time, which resulted in low activity scores and negatively impacted user experience with the business application.

The backend IT team has since identified the root cause and applied the necessary backend change. This change helped reduce Response Time for all business web application pages to less than two seconds on average. In particular, the “SALES & BOOKING” page’s average response time was only 1.19 seconds, compared to 5.14 seconds before the change. This is a five times reduction in page load time; therefore, user experience while working with the business application has improved drastically. From this example, Aternity has proven to provide invaluable insights for organizations to quantify productivity gains due to effective change management practices.

Achieve end-to-end visibility and foster cross-collaboration with Riverbed Portal

Riverbed Portal provides holistic performance visibility from a broad spectrum of data sources, including end-user experience, application performance and network and infrastructure monitoring. This is achieved via the ability to create a dashboard that visualizes the flow of data from the end user, via the network, to backend infrastructure or even cloud infrastructure. Each stakeholder and interest group may have different applications and key performance indicators that need to be monitored and tracked. This is often the basis of creating IT silos in most companies and organizations.

The critical benefit of a dashboard is to provide the right information to the right people at the right time while serving as the single source of truth that facilitates collaboration across different stakeholders, such as the device team, network team, system team and application team, that eliminates IT silos. Together with dashboards, application maps are used to model and define the systems and software used to support a specific business application and the users accessing that application.

The benefits of application maps are:

• Quickly identify an area of operational issues
• Reducing Mean-Time-To-Identify (MTTI) and eventually Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR)

This is why the leading global financial organizations leverage the Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience platform—a comprehensive solution designed to address the unique challenges they face while maintaining their competitive advantages. With Riverbed Aternity, companies can gain insights into customer journeys, both converting and non-converting, and track user experience at every step of their journey, identifying and optimizing the highest-converting paths and eliminating any roadblocks. In addition, the platform can monitor the employee experience for critical business applications used to support customers, reducing friction during customer journeys due to broken links and other issues.

Enhancing customer experience

At the heart of every financial institution’s success lies exceptional customer experience.  Riverbed Aternity DEM helps global financial services companies monitor and optimize the performance of their digital services, ensuring seamless and satisfying experiences for customers. With Riverbed Aternity’s advanced analytics and insights, financial institutions can proactively identify and resolve performance issues, thereby minimizing customer frustration and maximizing satisfaction.

One of these ways is with Aternity’s User Journey Intelligence (UJI) functionality. With UJI, Riverbed Aternity leverages advanced Real User Monitoring (RUM) technology to track user journeys and analyze web page load time, providing insights into top-line business metrics such as revenue, customer engagement, and customer abandonment. The platform also offers Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) for proactive issue identification. This is unique to Riverbed Aternity, where financial services companies can gain a competitive edge over pure-play DEM vendors lacking RUM, STM, or both.

Boosting employee productivity & accelerating digital transformation

In addition to improving customer experience, Riverbed Aternity DEM also enhances employee productivity by providing insights into the performance of internal applications and systems. By identifying bottlenecks and performance issues, Riverbed Aternity allows financial institutions to optimize their internal processes and workflows, resulting in increased efficiency and reduced operational costs.

As the global financial services industry continues to evolve, organizations must be agile and adaptable to stay ahead of the curve.  Riverbed Aternity DEM has supported financial institutions in their digital transformation journey by providing the tools and insights needed to optimize and innovate their digital services. With Riverbed Aternity, financial institutions across the globe have confidently embraced new technologies and delivered exceptional digital experiences to both customers and employees.

When Swiss Re, a leading provider of insurance, reinsurance and other forms of insurance-based risk solutions, underwent their digital transformation strategy they aimed to simplify collaboration among global teams and between Swiss Re and its external partners and customers. However, their existing device performance monitoring tool couldn’t provide a comprehensive understanding of their workforce’s experience, making it hard to interpret and scale. With Riverbed Aternity, Swiss Re was able to remotely, proactively, and non-invasively measure actual end-user experience, improving visibility and efficiency gains.

“What we particularly liked with Riverbed Aternity was the ease in which we could analyze and correlate data. Riverbed Aternity makes this insight easily available to a broader audience in a format that is scalable and sharable with our internal stakeholders,” said Joost Smit, Digital Workplace Solution Architect and Engineer at Swiss Re.

Looking ahead

These are just a couple of examples of how the Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Management platform is the ideal solution for global financial services companies looking to navigate the complexities of today’s digital landscape. By providing real-time insights into application performance, end-user experience, and overall system health, Riverbed Aternity DEM empowers financial institutions to deliver exceptional digital experiences, maintain regulatory compliance, and drive business growth.

To learn more about how Riverbed Aternity is helping financial services companies stay competitive in while addressing today’s challenges, watch our webinar on “How IT in Financial Services Can Stay Competitive in Economic Uncertainty,” featuring Emma Beckers, Senior Lead Engineer at Wells Fargo.

Andreesen Horowitz released an eye opening report in 2022 on what this can mean for a company’s economics and how high the committed cloud spend percentage is when compared to revenue. According to the report, controlling public cloud spend is a heavy uplift spanning many areas like system-redesign, moving workloads to more efficient hardware or even third party efficiency solutions. Andreesen Horowitz went further, sharing an example of how Dropbox used various optimization techniques and, despite a small dip in revenue, were able to improve their margins just by controlling their cloud spend.

How Riverbed Acceleration can help

Riverbed’s Acceleration solutions have three purpose-built algorithms for optimization to match different needs—Cloud Accelerator, Client Accelerator, and SaaS Accelerator. The optimization engine uses three techniques to reduce bandwidth use: blog or file caching, file compression, and byte stream look-ahead. More details can be seen in this helpful video:

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To visually demonstrate how much traffic can be saved in a branch-to-cloud, the image below shows one of Riverbed’s own offices where cost was a pain-point. it ended up reducing data usage by close to 30% without any manual tweaking required on the end servers or services.

Visibility and cost transparency

The first step in reducing cloud cost is identifying potential causes for high spend, particularly bandwidth usage. Determining the root-cause of high cost bandwidth can be a difficult task without the right tools in place. Riverbed observability tools will remain your faithful companion along this journey.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had interactive charts like below—showcasing the big groups or the individual bandwidth hogs in a visual report—rather than going through logs or cumbersome data mining exercises?

Trust Riverbed Acceleration for controlling cloud costs. To learn how Riverbed solutions can help reduce your organizations IT asset costs, visit this page.

One example of hybrid working could be a team that consists of both in-office and remote workers who collaborate through digital tools and communication channels. For instance, the team may use the office for important meetings, team building activities or project kick-off, and then switch to remote work.

In this scenario, the remote workers have the flexibility to choose when and where they work, based on their job responsibilities and personal preferences. They can use digital tools and collaboration platforms to stay connected with their in-office colleagues, share files and information, and collaborate on projects. Meanwhile, the in-office workers have the opportunity to work face-to-face and build relationships with their colleagues, while also benefiting from the flexibility of remote work.

Overall, the hybrid working model enables teams to have the best of both worlds by allowing for flexibility, collaboration, and an optimal work-life balance. This example of hybrid working can apply across multiple industries—technology, creative services, professional services, etc.

What does a hybrid workplace look like?

A hybrid workplace can take on different forms depending on the organization’s needs and the preferences of its employees. However, most hybrid workplaces have some common features:

1. A combination of in-person and remote work: By definition, a hybrid workplace allows employees to work both from the office and from remote locations, such as their homes or co-working spaces. When, and how often they do so, depends on the organization’s hybrid workplace policies.
2. Flexibility: Employees have the flexibility to work in different environments, depending on their job responsibilities, personal preferences, and the model of hybrid work addressed below. The choice of where and when to work may not be entirely up to the employee. They may have the option to work from the office for important meetings or team activities and work remotely for the rest of their workweek.
3. Digital tools and communication channels: To enable remote work and collaboration, a hybrid workplace relies on digital tools such as video conferencing software, messaging platforms, and cloud-based collaboration tools.
4. Adequate infrastructure: A hybrid workplace requires adequate infrastructure, such as high-speed internet, secure VPN connections, and laptops or other mobile devices, to support remote work. The technical infrastructure enables employees to work productively and securely while remote.
5. Work-life balance: Hybrid workplaces aim to provide employees with a better work-life balance by offering more flexibility in their work schedules, reducing commute times and costs, and allowing employees to work from home when needed.

Different types of hybrid working

Multiple hybrid working models exist. The best model for each organization will vary depending on the organization’s industry, customer base, and requirements for how the work gets done. Businesses can customize their hybrid working arrangements to meet the unique needs of their employees and organization.

1. Rotation Model: In this model, teams rotate between working in the office and working remotely. For example, a team may work from the office for two days a week and remotely for the remaining three days. Many organizations are adopting this model to ensure that a critical mass of employees is in the office on particular days. This can help foster collaboration and a strong company culture.
2. Flexibility Model: Here, employees have the flexibility to choose when and where they work, depending on their job responsibilities and personal preferences. For example, an employee may work from the office for important meetings and work from home for tasks that require more concentration. This model works best when employees are highly self-directed and when a high degree of trust exists within the organization. Managers have to be comfortable with empowering their employees to know when they need to come into the office.
3. Task-Based Model: In this model, employees work remotely or in the office based on the nature of their job responsibilities. For example, an employee may work from the office for tasks that require collaboration and work remotely for tasks that require more independent work. Or, employees with certain roles may be required to be in the office most days.

Do employees prefer hybrid work?

Even as we put the COVID-19 pandemic in the rear-view mirror, many employees prefer a hybrid work model. A survey by McKinsey Company found that 75% of remote workers prefer a hybrid work model. PwC’s US Pulse Survey found that 72% of employees would like a mix of remote and in-person work.

The reasons for this preference vary, but some potential advantages of hybrid working for employees include a better work-life balance, lower commute times and expenses, increased flexibility, and the ability to avoid office distractions while still maintaining social connections with coworkers. The pandemic has shown that remote work can be effective, and many employees now value the flexibility that it offers.

Individual employee preferences vary, and some may still prefer full-time remote work or full-time in-person work depending on their job responsibilities, personal preferences, and individual circumstances. Management should consider the needs and preferences of their employees when designing their work arrangements.

When do employees prefer in-office work?

While many employees prefer hybrid or remote work models, some still prefer to work in an office. Some aspects of in-office work which may appeal to employees, or which are fundamental to the nature of the job include:

1. Face-to-face interaction: Some employees prefer to work in an office because they enjoy face-to-face interaction with colleagues and the social atmosphere of a workplace. They may feel more energized and engaged when they are surrounded by people. On-the-job learning is far more effective in person, and the in-office environment is especially useful for younger people just entering the workforce, or those who are new to their jobs.
2. Structure and routine: Employees who prefer to work in an office may also value structure and routine in their workday. They may prefer the clear separation between work and home life that an office provides. There’s a certain feeling of satisfaction and relief in being able to leave the job behind when you go home for the day.
3. Collaborative environment: Some employees may work better when they collaborate with colleagues in person. They may prefer the ability to bounce ideas off of others and work together on projects. Teams involved in creative problem solving are more likely to do better in an office environment where the ideas can flow freely, and non-verbal communication can thrive.
4. Specific resources or equipment: Some employees may require access to specific resources or equipment that are only available in an office environment. For example, they may need access to a laboratory, specialized software or hardware, or specific tools for their job. There’s just no getting around the workplace when you work on an assembly line, a blast furnace, or in a biopharmaceutical lab.
5. Difficulty focusing at home: Some employees may find it challenging to focus on their work when they are at home. They may find it difficult to avoid distractions, such as household chores, family members, or to be sure, napping on the couch!

The IT challenges of hybrid work and how Riverbed addresses them

The shift to hybrid work presents several challenges for IT organizations as they strive to support their fellow employees. Some of the main challenges include:

1. Security: With employees working from remote locations, there is an increased risk of security breaches and cyber-attacks. IT organizations must ensure that their remote workers have secure connections to company networks, and that company data is protected from unauthorized access. When security operations teams conduct forensic analysis of security threats, they need full-fidelity insight into every packet and flow, such as that provided by Riverbed Network Performance Management.
2. Technology infrastructure: Hybrid work requires reliable and robust technology infrastructure to support remote work, such as high-speed internet, VPN access, cloud-based applications, and video conferencing tools. IT organizations must ensure that their systems can handle increased traffic and that remote workers have access to the necessary technology. Riverbed Acceleration enables organizations to accelerate any application over any network, to employees wherever they work.
3. Device management: With employees using a variety of devices and operating systems to access company data, IT organizations must manage and secure these devices to ensure data protection and compliance with company policies. Only by measuring actual employee experience, like with Riverbed Aternity, can digital workplace teams ensure that they’re providing their employees with the devices and applications that enable them to be productive, wherever they work.
4. Collaboration tools: Hybrid work requires effective collaboration tools that enable remote workers to stay connected with their in-office colleagues and collaborate on projects. IT organizations must provide reliable and easy-to-use collaboration tools that are accessible from any location. IT teams must manage the entire portfolio of collaboration tools on which their employees rely. Riverbed Aternity enables them to do that.
5. Support: With remote workers, IT organizations must provide effective and timely technical support to address any issues that arise. This requires a different support model that can respond quickly to remote workers’ needs. The highly distributed nature of complex remote work environments makes this a challenge. IT teams can leverage Riverbed IQ to proactively identify and resolve complex issues, while minimizing the need for expensive “war room” troubleshooting processes.
6. Training and education: With the adoption of new technologies and tools, IT organizations must provide ongoing training and education to their employees to ensure they are using these tools effectively and securely. Gartner refers to this as the “Digital Dexterity Gap.”

You can learn more about Riverbed’s solutions for managing the complexity of hybrid work by visiting our hybrid work solution page. Even better, you can start a Request Demo of our software to determine if it’s right for your organization.

This is why the leading global financial organizations leverage the Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Management (DEM) platform—a comprehensive solution designed to address the unique challenges they face while maintaining their competitive advantages. With Riverbed Aternity, companies can gain insights into customer journeys, both converting and non-converting, and track user experience at every step of their journey, identifying and optimizing the highest-converting paths and eliminating any roadblocks. In addition, the platform can monitor the employee experience for critical business applications used to support customers, reducing friction during customer journeys due to broken links and other issues.

Enhancing customer experience

At the heart of every financial institution’s success lies exceptional customer experience.  Riverbed Aternity DEM helps global financial services companies monitor and optimize the performance of their digital services, ensuring seamless and satisfying experiences for customers. With Riverbed Aternity’s advanced analytics and insights, financial institutions can proactively identify and resolve performance issues, thereby minimizing customer frustration and maximizing satisfaction.

One of these ways is with Aternity’s User Journey Intelligence (UJI) functionality. With UJI, Riverbed Aternity leverages advanced Real User Monitoring (RUM) technology to track user journeys and analyze web page load time, providing insights into top-line business metrics such as revenue, customer engagement, and customer abandonment. The platform also offers Synthetic Transaction Monitoring (STM) for proactive issue identification. This is unique to Riverbed Aternity, where financial services companies can gain a competitive edge over pure-play DEM vendors lacking RUM, STM, or both.

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Boosting employee productivity & accelerating digital transformation

In addition to improving customer experience, Riverbed Aternity DEM also enhances employee productivity by providing insights into the performance of internal applications and systems. By identifying bottlenecks and performance issues, Riverbed Aternity allows financial institutions to optimize their internal processes and workflows, resulting in increased efficiency and reduced operational costs.

As the global financial services industry continues to evolve, organizations must be agile and adaptable to stay ahead of the curve.  Riverbed Aternity DEM has supported financial institutions in their digital transformation journey by providing the tools and insights needed to optimize and innovate their digital services. With Riverbed Aternity, financial institutions across the globe have confidently embraced new technologies and delivered exceptional digital experiences to both customers and employees.

When Swiss Re, a leading provider of insurance, reinsurance and other forms of insurance-based risk solutions, underwent their digital transformation strategy they aimed to simplify collaboration among global teams and between Swiss Re and its external partners and customers. However, their existing device performance monitoring tool couldn’t provide a comprehensive understanding of their workforce’s experience, making it hard to interpret and scale. With Riverbed Aternity, Swiss Re was able to remotely, proactively, and non-invasively measure actual end-user experience, improving visibility and efficiency gains.

“What we particularly liked with Aternity was the ease in which we could analyze and correlate data. Riverbed Aternity makes this insight easily available to a broader audience in a format that is scalable and sharable with our internal stakeholders,” said Joost Smit, Digital Workplace Solution Architect and Engineer at Swiss Re.

Looking ahead

These are just a couple of examples of how the Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Management platform is the ideal solution for global financial services companies looking to navigate the complexities of today’s digital landscape. By providing real-time insights into application performance, end-user experience, and overall system health, Riverbed Aternity DEM empowers financial institutions to deliver exceptional digital experiences, maintain regulatory compliance, and drive business growth.

That’s why it is a significant accomplishment to earn approval from the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) for the release of a Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for any technology solution. STIG validation means that DISA has conducted a review and approved the solution’s defined configuration and security standards. Federal agencies and users that implement that IT solution and follow the STIG guidelines are complying with DoD security policies. They can feel confident they’re using best practices to protect their networks, data and users from cyber threats.

DISA approves Riverbed NetProfiler STIG

DISA recently announced that it has reviewed and approved the STIG for Riverbed’s NetProfiler, which provides network performance monitoring, network flow analytics and centralized reporting tools. NetProfiler affords agencies continuous visibility into the performance of endpoints, applications and users on the network, including providing alerts on any significant changes in network behavior. Those capabilities are key for maintaining strong IT security controls and enhancing user performance and user experience.

DoD and other federal users with CAC cards with appropriate security certificates can access the Riverbed NetProfiler STIG on the DoD Cyber Exchange website.

A critical role in compliance and security

In today’s environment, the roles of DISA and the DoD Cyber Exchange are more critical than ever. Part of DISA’s mission is to make the DoD network secure and resilient against cybersecurity threats, focusing on infrastructure and network security, and strengthening cybersecurity measures, including boundary defense and endpoint security. Its ultimate goal is achieving information dominance by providing an enterprise infrastructure so effective that its users have a significant advantage in combat.

The DoD Cyber Exchange provides one-stop access to cyber information, policy, guidance and training for cyber professionals throughout the DoD. Some portions of the Cyber Exchange website are also available to other Federal Government employees and to the general public. By making some of these resources available to the public, the Cyber Exchange helps users comply with rules, regulations, best practices and federal laws.

Since 2009, NetProfiler has a consistent track record of successful performance across the DoD and other the federal agencies. Now this latest milestone—STIG certification—provides additional assurance that NetProfiler can be implemented easily and securely and used with confidence to solve network visibility challenges.

For more information on NetProfiler including use cases, data sheets and other customer success stories, please visit our website.

Hybrid work involves a combination of in-person and remote work, while remote work is entirely location-independent. Understanding the differences between these two models is essential for businesses and employees as they consider the most effective and sustainable ways to work in a post-pandemic world.

This blog covers the differences between hybrid work and remote work and the advantages and challenges associated with each model. It also provides insights into employee preferences on hybrid vs remote work, how businesses can choose the right model for their workforce, and the challenges for IT organizations in supporting hybrid work.

What is remote work?

Remote work is a work model that enables employees to work from a location other than a traditional office setting. In remote work, employees can work from home, a coworking space, a coffee shop, or any other location with an internet connection. Remote work can be full-time, part-time or occasional and is enabled by technology such as video conferencing, messaging platforms, and cloud-based collaboration tools that allow employees to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues.

Remote work has become increasingly popular in recent years due to the flexibility it provides to employees and the benefits it offers to employers, such as reduced overhead costs and access to a broader pool of talent. With remote work, employers are no longer constrained to the workforce located geographically close to their offices. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the adoption of remote work, as many companies had to transition their employees to remote work to maintain business continuity while ensuring the safety of their workforce. Now that we’re emerging from the pandemic, companies are evaluating and evolving their remote work policies.

What is hybrid work?

Hybrid work combines remote work and in-person work in a flexible way. It allows employees to work either from a physical office or from a remote location, such as their home, co-working spaces or other remote locations.

In a hybrid work model, employees have more flexibility to choose where and how they work, depending on the nature of their work and personal preferences. This can be achieved through the use of technology such as video conferencing, messaging platforms, and cloud-based collaboration tools that enable remote work.

The hybrid work model has become increasingly popular in recent years, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced many companies to adopt remote work practices. Hybrid work provides companies with the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining a collaborative work culture and achieving business objectives. Post-pandemic, many employees have continued to express a preference for hybrid work, as evidenced by commercial office vacancy rates remaining below pre-pandemic levels.

Do employees prefer hybrid work vs remote work?

The preference for hybrid vs remote work varies among employees and can depend on various factors, including job responsibilities, personal preferences, and individual circumstances. Some employees may prefer remote work because it allows them to have a more flexible work schedule, reduces commuting time and expenses, and provides a better work-life balance. Other employees may prefer hybrid work because it allows them to have a balance of in-person collaboration and the flexibility of remote work.

Several surveys conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic suggest that many employees prefer a hybrid work model, which allows them to have the best of both worlds. For example, a survey by McKinsey Company found that 75% of remote workers would prefer a hybrid work model in the future. PwC’s US Pulse Survey found that 72% of employees would like a mix of remote and in-person work. However, it’s important to note that individual preferences may vary, and some employees may still prefer full-time remote work or full-time in-person work.

The prevalence of hybrid work varies across industries

The prevalence of hybrid work varies across industries based on several factors such as the nature of the work, the level of customer interaction required, and the extent to which technology can facilitate remote work. Some industries are more likely to embrace hybrid work arrangements, while others may be more hesitant.

Here are some examples:

• Technology: The technology industry has been at the forefront of remote work and hybrid work arrangements, given the nature of the work and the tools available. Many tech companies have been able to seamlessly transition to hybrid work during the pandemic, and some have announced permanent hybrid work arrangements.
• Finance: The finance industry has traditionally been more resistant to remote work due to the need for face-to-face client interactions and the security concerns associated with handling sensitive financial information. For example, Goldman Sachs’ CEO David Solomon is a strong proponent of in-office work, and 65% of the Goldman Sachs employees now report to the office 5 days a week. However, the pandemic has forced many finance companies to adopt remote work and hybrid work arrangements, and some have found that it can be done successfully.
• Healthcare: The healthcare industry has also been slow to adopt remote work due to the nature of the work and the need for in-person patient care. However, some healthcare companies have found ways to incorporate hybrid work arrangements for administrative staff and other non-clinical roles. The Centers for Disease Control report a significant increase in the use of telemedicine.
• Education: The education industry has also had to adapt to hybrid work arrangements during the pandemic, with many teachers and professors teaching remotely or using a hybrid approach. However, some aspects of education, such as lab work and hands-on training, are more challenging to do remotely.
• Manufacturing: The manufacturing industry has traditionally been more resistant to remote work due to the need for physical presence on the production line. However, some manufacturing companies have found ways to incorporate remote work for administrative and support staff.

The technology challenges of hybrid work

Hybrid work can make the job of the IT team more challenging in several ways:

1. Supporting remote and in-office workers: With hybrid work, the IT team needs to support both remote and in-office workers, which can require additional tools and infrastructure to ensure that everyone has access to the same resources and can work seamlessly together. Digital Experience Management software, such as Riverbed Aternity, provides visibility to digital workplace teams to ensure that employees get a great experience no matter where they’re working.
2. Ensuring network security: Hybrid work can increase the risk of cyber-attacks, as remote workers may be using personal devices or working from unsecured networks. The IT team needs to ensure that the network and data are secure, even when employees are working remotely. When security operations teams conduct forensic analysis of security threats, they need full-fidelity insight into every packet and flow, such as that provided by Riverbed Network Performance Management
3. Managing multiple collaboration tools: With hybrid work, employees may use multiple collaboration tools, such as video conferencing, messaging apps, and project management tools, which can make it challenging for the IT team to manage and secure all of these tools and ensure that they work well together. Aternity supports the leading collaboration tools, such as Teams, Zoom, and Webex.
4. Balancing flexibility and control: Hybrid work requires a balance between flexibility and control, as the IT team needs to ensure that employees have the tools they need to work effectively while also maintaining control over the network and data. This can be a delicate balancing act that requires careful management.
5. Addressing technical issues: With remote work, employees may experience technical issues that are more difficult to resolve remotely. In addition, with remote work, technical issues can be caused by factors outside of IT’s control, such as Wi-Fi signal strength, ISP bandwidth, or SaaS performance. The IT team needs to be able to address these issues quickly and efficiently to minimize disruptions to work. Learn more about how Riverbed enables teams to “shift left” with automated remediation, to resolve issues at the lowest level possible and as fast as possible.

Overall, hybrid work can make the job of the IT team more challenging, as they need to support a more diverse and distributed workforce while maintaining network security, managing multiple collaboration tools, and addressing technical issues. Learn more about Riverbed’s solutions for hybrid work that make it possible to manage these challenges and enable a successful hybrid work environment. You can start a Request Demo of our solutions to see if they make sense for you.

Customization becomes relevant when the IT teams need specific performance analysis based on data that Aternity is not currently monitoring out-of-the-box. This is also true when the Service Desk team needs to avoid connecting remotely to a device to verify data such as current configurations, installed software, services in use and system details. Riverbed Aternity addresses this need by providing a mechanism to customize and automate data collection and the dashboards based on stakeholder needs.

One example of the need to customize these metrics came from a large German industrial company. The organization needed to create dozens of custom PowerShell, WMI and event log monitors to collect custom data based on their IT teams’ requirements. They used the custom monitoring to provide the IT daily business with enhanced and extended visibility, allowing deeper analysis and more informed decision making aligned with their organization’s goals.

Support the daily business of the Service Desk

To support the daily need of the Service Desk team, Riverbed Professional Services initially used the Out-Of-the-Box (OOB) Riverbed Aternity dashboards, which were found to be an excellent starting point. This enabled the team to investigate problems with malfunctioning devices that employees in the organization were complaining about. The dashboard summaries, where the main and most important device metrics were visible, helped the support engineers with initial troubleshooting without having to connect to devices remotely. This saved time and accelerated their troubleshooting. Without the need to ask a number of questions for a support issue or browsing to the remote device, the Service Desk teams could quickly see device CPU speed and type, memory size, the model, disk free space, corporate browser usage, and much more. However, there were times where the Service Desk team required additional knowledge on the properties of a device, location or user, which Aternity did not detect OOB.

Creating custom monitoring to collect custom data enables deeper troubleshooting and enterprise-wide analysis. This is because custom data can be used to more easily group together items that share a distinct property and monitor performance. Moreover, custom data can then be exposed in the Riverbed Aternity Rest APIs or in the OOB Analyze dashboards.

The German industrial sector company mentioned in the example earlier configured a custom monitor to report the device RAM channel mode, and then created a custom dashboard to compare the performance of Single vs Dual RAM channel mode. In their other use cases, the customer’s Service Desk goal was to proactively improve the digital end user experience by looking for specific configurations impacting users. As an example, the Service Desk team created a monitor that collected information about several services to decide if they were being used and if they could disable them via Group Policy.

The following list provides further examples of the custom monitors created by this company for the daily work of their Service Desk team:

• Get RAM Channel Mode
• Get WiFi drivers
• Check Autologon enabled
• Check usage of services: disable non used services by GPO policies
• Get Battery Wear check when more than 2 batteries in place
• Has Dbutil Installed
• License Recovery Dialog Shown
• MS Defender Version
• Network Access Users
• Network Discovery Monitor LDAP
• DMA Kernel Protection Status
• Get Aternity Browser Extension Version
• Get Batch Logon Users
• Get HVCI Status
• Get Open Firewall Rule
• Get Secure Boot Status
• Get Service Logon Users
• Get Reliability Grade /WMI

This enhanced visibility meant that the Service Desk team were more efficient without involving users with remote sessions, allowing them to compare different configurations based on performance/cost criteria. It also allowed them to implement proactive optimizations to improve the digital user experience.

Enhanced analysis and troubleshooting for better decision making

The Riverbed Aternity UI allowed the IT Service Desk teams to see the most valuable information for their daily business. This enabled them to create custom-data based dashboards to expose and analyze data as required for informed decision making.

Using this methodology, the customer created several custom monitors in Aternity for the security team. Using these monitors, the team was able to automatically and proactively detect potential security issues related to wrong proxy client configurations, unsigned drivers and available security features. In the Aternity Dashboard shown below you can see the Netskope configurations derived from custom data collection:

As shown above, Riverbed Aternity provides a flexible and easy to use mechanism to collect custom data based on the IT Service teams’ actual needs and to enhance and extend Riverbed Aternity’s Out Of the Box real-time visibility and actionable insights. This allows enhanced monitoring, which in turn increases team efficiency, enables collaboration, saves time, reduces costs, maximizes uptimes, and provides informed decision making aligned with organizational goals.

Having to make do with less purchasing power is challenging, but there are opportunities to help your customers generate efficiencies within IT and get more out of every penny. In this blog, we explore how Digital Experience can help your customers’ teams reduce costs while maintaining a flawless digital experiences.

What is Aternity DEM?

Digital Experience is a full spectrum, digital experience platform that provides insight into the business impact of customer and employee digital experiences. It achieves this by capturing and storing technical telemetry at scale from employee devices, business applications, and cloud-native application services.

Equipped with this comprehensive visibility into the actual user experience and device performance, IT teams can create better experiences for users and leaders can make informed business decisions on IT spend. Here’s how:

Smart Device Refresh

Typically, IT teams will refresh devices based on their age, say, every three or four years. But age alone doesn’t speak to the actual health or performance of a device. Some perfectly good devices may be thrown out too soon, and other faulty devices need to be replaced a bit sooner so an employee can optimize their productivity. Riverbed Aternity DEM offers insight into actual user experience and device performance, informing teams on when to replace devices based on performance.

What it means for your clients: intelligent device replacement helps save them money by refreshing devices exactly when they need to be replaced, and not a moment sooner.

Eliminated Software Bloat

We all keep subscriptions longer than necessary, and the same is true for enterprises. A SaaS trends report found the average company wastes more than $135,000 annually on unused, underused, or duplicate SaaS tools and this cost increases dramatically for large enterprises. Riverbed Aternity DEM gives IT the power to automatically identify software licenses that are going unused or aren’t used often.

What it means for your clients: Instantly reduce software bloat by cutting licenses that are going mostly unused and redeploy those savings in ways that can better help the business.

Curtailed Shadow IT

All too frequently, teams across an enterprise will purchase SaaS tools without going through the proper IT channels. This inevitably leads to redundancies, increased risk, and headaches for IT. But Riverbed Aternity DEM can identify shadow IT software, and either direct usage to an approved application to eliminate the additional expense, or leverage approved purchasing channels to better handle the spend.

What it means for your clients: By curtailing shadow IT, IT teams can better understand and manage the software being used by employees. At the same time, it helps IT identify and eliminate duplicate and wasteful solutions so budgets are more effectively and efficiently utilized.

Cut costs and improve performance

Many IT departments have room to gain operational efficiencies by eliminating waste, thus maximizing every dollar. These efficiencies don’t have to come at the expense of the user experience. On the contrary, reducing wasteful spending can add money back into budgets that can then be used to hire talent and fill labor gaps, reducing the burden on IT departments so they’re more productive. Riverbed Aternity DEM helps organizations save on their IT costs while at the same time enabling even better digital experiences. It’s a win-win.

To how you can put this into action for your team, register for our upcoming webinar “Budget Getting Tight? How IT Leaders Reduce Costs Without Sacrificing User Experience.”

Having to make do with less purchasing power is challenging, but there are opportunities to generate efficiencies within IT and get more out of every penny. In this blog, we explore how Digital Experience can help IT teams reduce costs while maintaining a flawless digital experiences.

What is Riverbed Aternity DEM?

Riverbed Aternity DEM (Digital Experience Management) is a full spectrum, digital experience management platform that provides insight into the business impact of customer and employee digital experiences. It achieves this by capturing and storing technical telemetry at scale from employee devices, business applications, and cloud-native application services.

Equipped with this comprehensive visibility into the actual user experience and device performance, IT teams can create better experiences for users and leaders can make informed business decisions on IT spend. Here’s how:

Smart Device Refresh

Typically, IT teams will refresh devices based on their age, say, every three or four years. But age alone doesn’t speak to the actual health or performance of a device. Some perfectly good devices may be thrown out too soon, and other faulty devices need to be replaced a bit sooner so an employee can optimize their productivity. Riverbed Aternity DEM offers insight into actual user experience and device performance, informing teams on when to replace devices based on performance.

What it means for you: intelligent device replacement helps save you money by refreshing devices exactly when they need to be replaced, and not a moment sooner.

Eliminated Software Bloat

We all keep subscriptions longer than necessary, and the same is true for enterprises. A SaaS trends report found the average company wastes more than $135,000 annually on unused, underused, or duplicate SaaS tools and this cost increases dramatically for large enterprises. Riverbed Aternity DEM gives IT the power to automatically identify software licenses that are going unused or aren’t used often.

What it means for you: Instantly reduce software bloat by cutting licenses that are going mostly unused and redeploy those savings in ways that can better help the business.

Curtailed Shadow IT

All too frequently, teams across an enterprise will purchase SaaS tools without going through the proper IT channels. This inevitably leads to redundancies, increased risk, and headaches for IT. But Riverbed Aternity DEM can identify shadow IT software, and either direct usage to an approved application to eliminate the additional expense, or leverage approved purchasing channels to better handle the spend.

What it means for you: By curtailing shadow IT, IT teams can better understand and manage the software being used by employees. At the same time, it helps IT identify and eliminate duplicate and wasteful solutions so budgets are more effectively and efficiently utilized.

Cut costs and improve performance

Many IT departments have room to gain operational efficiencies by eliminating waste, thus maximizing every dollar. These efficiencies don’t have to come at the expense of the user experience. On the contrary, reducing wasteful spending can add money back into budgets that can then be used to hire talent and fill labor gaps, reducing the burden on IT departments so they’re more productive. Riverbed Aternity DEM helps organizations save on their IT costs while at the same time enabling even better digital experiences. It’s a win-win.

To how you can put this into action for your team, register for our upcoming webinar “Budget Getting Tight? How IT Leaders Reduce Costs Without Sacrificing User Experience.”

If you’re dealing with these types of challenges, Riverbed Acceleration is your solution!

Help on the way!

Riverbed’s Acceleration solutions support peak performance to every user, everywhere and provide fast, agile, secure acceleration of any app over any network to users, whether mobile, remote, or in the office. Thousands of organizations across the globe use our Acceleration solutions plus WAN acceleration technology. In a recent EMA survey on WAN transformation, 71% of respondents reported that they use WAN acceleration technology to improve application performance on their network.

Read on to learn how one of Riverbed’s customers leverages our Acceleration solutions to boost document transfer speed and reduce costs.

Hear from a customer

Since 2005, Quarles & Brady, a law firm on the American Lawyer’s AM Law 200 list of the largest U.S. based legal service providers, has relied on Riverbed Acceleration solutions to speed up processes when dealing with clients’ documents and data.

With over 1,100 users, including 500 attorneys, Quarles’ IT infrastructure handles significant amounts of information. The firm’s attorneys share, upload, and download large volumes of client data on a day-to-day basis.

Before working with Riverbed, attorneys at Quarles used a Microsoft file server and Microsoft Exchange to transfer legal documents to and from clients. The speed of this process is essential to keep costs low while the firm focuses on providing excellent service to clients. However, they faced immense challenges with this approach, including:

• Long document upload, download, and transfer times, which is challenging as attorneys work through cases
• High cost of attorney fees due to long transfer times
• Hybrid, distributed workforce that needs accessible, secure, and high-performing apps to perform job duties

Riverbed Acceleration solutions

Quarles uses both Riverbed SteelHead and Client Accelerator to address these challenges:

• Riverbed SteelHead dramatically speeds up the performance of applications anywhere in an organization while delivering the best end-user experience, even under sub optimal network conditions. Highly usable and compatible with customer environments, the solution is engineered for fast, seamless network integration into remote sites and branch offices, or data centers with scalable performance designed to support a growing number of users, devices, data, and application types.
• Riverbed Client Accelerator delivers leading-edge application acceleration to dispersed workforces. The solution provides mobile employees with fast, reliable access to leading enterprise SaaS and on-prem applications. Compatible with your infrastructure (e.g., it supports leading operating systems), the solution improves network and application performance, security, and productivity for users anywhere.

Lower costs and better infrastructure

For Quarles, after implementing Riverbed Solutions, the speed boost in document management, such as downloads and uploads, went from taking minutes to just seconds. “What Riverbed allows us to do, no matter what application we roll out, is to almost guarantee that document transfer will be more efficient with the Acceleration solutions in place,” said James Oryszczyn, Director of Security and Network Services at Quarles.

Increasing speed via the Riverbed Acceleration solutions has also helped the firm cut costs, since it does not need to increase bandwidth and buy larger circuits to allow remote users with a below-par Internet connection to share documents. For more details on this case study click here!

You can also learn more about Riverbed Acceleration solutions on our web site, by reading this blog post, or by signing up for a Request Demo.

Objective data can provide insights into digital experience. However, it doesn’t capture the actual feelings of the user that are necessary to truly understand how they’re interacting with technologies and capture frustrations that go beyond the device and app performance metrics. Service desks can send out email surveys, yet, these tend to have poor response rates, as users will either ignore or overlook those types of touchpoints. Having a blindside on what and how the employees feel on a day-to-day basis can negatively impact business outcomes—impeding digital transformation initiatives, adoption of new services or increasing turnover.

The solution needs to be frictionless and fast for users. To bridge this gap, RiverbedAternity has released Aternity Sentiment in public beta, a holistic solution for digital experience management that captures both quantitative and qualitative data. By integrating Sentiment with digital experience management (DEM) workflows, organizations can assess the total user experience and discover hidden issues tied to how users feel about the technologies they interact with, IT teams can analyze this data and prioritize where to make investments to meet XLAs.

How does it work?

By capturing both objective and qualitative data, Aternity Sentiment gives IT leaders a comprehensive understanding of the digital employee experience by adding the human element to the data they collect. IT teams create customizable surveys to capture accurate feedback from users and address issues. For example, IT can get details on how a certain application may be running on a user’s Windows 10 desktop after an update rolls out, or assess their experience with battery performance on a laptop that other users have reported.

IT leaders can even analyze the users’ feelings regarding a digital transformation initiative by having multiple checkpoints during rollouts of new services, enabling a direct, two-way communication of real-time information. They can even engage directly with employees on potential issues related to their systems and provide details to address those issues without the need to log in a ticket, saving time for both end-users and IT teams.

By also viewing Aternity Digital Experience Index (DXI) data, IT can identify hot spots that require employee engagement by gathering their actual experience where unaddressed issues could result in poor Aternity DXI scores. With built-in filtering capabilities that show performance by business unit, device manufacturer, and more, Aternity’s DXI capabilities show immediate, targeted performance insights and set IT on the right path to diagnose root cause and solve issues that go beyond the device and app metrics.

For end-users, Aternity Sentiment empowers them to provide insights and give them a voice, giving them a channel to provide feedback on new technology rollouts, application and device experiences, and overall company initiatives. When they log into their machines, they will get a notification indicating a survey question the IT team has targeted them to address.

From there, IT teams can analyze the results (OOTB or Create Your Own) or export them to their own tool via our REST API and augment that with the data that Aternity DEM already collects. From there, they can focus on what areas to improve. For example, when Aternity detects that Excel is performing poorly, do users notice or is it a background process that went undetected? Based on the responses, IT teams can prioritize accordingly. This ensures they’re leveraging all the tools at their disposal to ensure they’re meeting experience goals.

Aternity Sentiment is a game-changer in digital experience analytics. By capturing qualitative feedback along with objective performance data, Aternity Sentiment provides a complete understanding of the digital employee experience, enabling organizations to drive increased customer satisfaction and employee productivity. To learn more, check out the Aternity Sentiment Beta user guide.

When networks were confined to just the data center, it was easier to monitor. But now that networks stretch significantly outside the data center—all the way to the campus, remote office or cloud—the threats to the network become more prevalent because your rubber band is stretched to its limits. In doing so, keeping your distributed network compliant and secure is a challenge.

Beware bad apples

Bad actors are always trying to exploit those vulnerabilities in the far stretched network. It only takes the baddies one time to find their way into a network by running a corrupt file, non-compliant application or old operating system. If an application or OS is out of compliance, no longer supported, or is riddled with security issues, this can translate to serious loss of productivity, customer sentiment and revenue. In addition, a company can end up paying millions in fines and can have additional financial impact just in the recovery process alone.

Many highly regulated industries like finance, government or medical are trying to police themselves when it comes to such issues of compliance and security. It’s better to monitor themselves and hold their businesses up to a higher standard instead of the government passing major regulations that cause wide sweeping change, often at great expense to the business. Government regulation is often a last resort so better to look after yourselves. If the government gets involved, it’s often due to a catastrophic event propagated by a single vendor effecting a client and millions of their customers. And those regulations ultimately could impact every network vendor in that particular industry.

One bad apple can financially ruin the apple cart for all parties involved.

Secure networks with Riverbed NPM

Riverbed’s Network Performance Management (NPM) portfolio recently implemented a feature enhancement across its products as a result of regulated institutions requiring this change of all their vendors. In response to the prevalence of Ransomware attacks happening across various sectors, industry leaders mandated their vendors who operated products within their networks to implement what Riverbed calls Automated Orchestration.

This recent feature integrated across Riverbed AppResponse, NetProfiler, NetIM and Portal allows any of these products to be stood up; and in the event of an internal or external threat, have the product taken down and redeployed automatically to a known safe state. This in turn saves time, money and mitigates risks associated with manual intervention. Automated Orchestration across your NPM portfolio will ensure compliance as well as security so that your network keeps running and avoid the risk of potential fines or negative financial impact.

For more information on the Riverbed NPM portfolio of products, please visit this page.

When networks were confined to just the data center, it was easier to monitor. But now that networks stretch significantly outside the data center—all the way to the campus, remote office or cloud—the threats to the network become more prevalent because the customer’s rubber band is stretched to its limits. In doing so, keeping their distributed network compliant and secure is a challenge.

Beware bad apples

Bad actors are always trying to exploit those vulnerabilities in the far stretched network. It only takes the baddies one time to find their way into a network by running a corrupt file, non-compliant application or old operating system. If an application or OS is out of compliance, no longer supported, or is riddled with security issues, this can translate to serious loss of productivity, customer sentiment and revenue. In addition, a company can end up paying millions in fines and can have additional financial impact just in the recovery process alone.

Many highly regulated industries like finance, government or medical are trying to police themselves when it comes to such issues of compliance and security. It’s better to monitor themselves and hold their businesses up to a higher standard instead of the government passing major regulations that cause wide sweeping change, often at great expense to the business. Government regulation is often a last resort so it’s better for your customers to look after themselves—with your help. If the government gets involved, it’s often due to a catastrophic event propagated by a single vendor effecting a client and millions of their customers. And those regulations ultimately could impact every network vendor in that particular industry.

One bad apple can financially ruin the apple cart for all parties involved.

Secure networks with Riverbed Network Observability

Riverbed’s Network Observability portfolio recently implemented a feature enhancement across its products as a result of regulated institutions requiring this change of all their vendors. In response to the prevalence of Ransomware attacks happening across various sectors, industry leaders mandated their vendors who operated products within their networks to implement what Riverbed calls Automated Orchestration.

This recent feature integrated across Riverbed AppResponse, NetProfiler, NetIM and Portal allows any of these products to be stood up; and in the event of an internal or external threat, have the product taken down and redeployed automatically to a known safe state. This in turn saves time, money and mitigates risks associated with manual intervention. Automated Orchestration across your client’s NPM portfolio will ensure compliance as well as security so that their network keeps running and avoid the risk of potential fines or negative financial impact.

For more information on the Riverbed Network Observability portfolio of products, please visit the Riverbed Network Observability solution section of the Partner Portal.

However, many of these monitoring tools are necessary to provide different perspectives of network, application, and end user performance. Yet, some tools can be so entrenched that any change or attempt to consolidate is significant endeavor. To move away from these ingrained tools often means incurring significant costs and time.

Riverbed IQ Unified Observability

Riverbed IQ, Riverbed’s SaaS-delivered Unified Observability service, empowers IT to identify and fix problems fast. It leverages Riverbed full-fidelity end user experience, network and application data, then applies machine learning (ML) to contextually correlate the disparate data streams to identify business-impacting events. This intelligence informs IQ’s automated runbooks that gather supporting context, filter out noise, and set priorities. As a result, Riverbed IQ reduces alert overload and accelerates root cause analysis of the most impactful alerts.

Riverbed IQ now includes third-party data

Now the Riverbed team recognizes that when a company uses an abundance of monitoring tools, they want to integrate all their data in Riverbed IQ to truly simplify the troubleshooting process. So, we added the capability to import data from other solutions (think third-party monitoring tools or business intelligence). Plus, IQ can export intelligent insights to third-party solutions like Slack, ServiceNow, custom scripts, Ansible runbooks, etc.

The third-party data is added through the automated runbooks where the data can then be used as if it’s native Riverbed data. Use it for decision making (if X happens, get relevant data from solution Y and visualizations. Because IT can now use all data in its environment, IQ better tailors the automated investigations to the organization’s troubleshooting process.

How it works

The integration process is simple yet flexible enough to support a non-Riverbed solutions in just a few, easy steps. First you need to authenticate with the third party solution. Then you can build an “HTTP Request,” which enables IQ to leverage data from any solution with a public REST API. Finally, “Transform” translates the third-party data into terms Riverbed IQ understands.

Watch this video to see how to build and use third-party integrations:

Leverage any data

With this announcement, Riverbed IQ can leverage any data in the IT or business environment that could inform troubleshooting. In fact, one Riverbed IQ customer in the petroleum industry pulls in oil viscosity data when troubleshooting certain issues.

For more information about Riverbed IQ or how to leverage third-party data within runbooks, visit the Riverbed IQ web page.

To protect critical customer, business and employee data, more and more businesses are opting to migrate workspaces to virtual environments. Migrating to a virtual environment has many upsides, however can bring unforeseen challenges that can impact performance and undermine the initiative altogether.

With adoption growing quickly, Zero Trust Network Architectures (ZTNA) like SASE and Security Service Edge (SSE) enable users to securely access to their applications, devices, data, etc. wherever they are located. For companies, this means that a threat can be easily contained and isolated in the event of a breach. The problem is that the tunnels that secure the data also reduce visibility and add monitoring and troubleshooting complexity.

ITOps teams can no longer look into traffic directly within these environments. As the traffic enters a Zscaler or Netskope tunnel, for example, it gets combined and homogenized. As a result, IT loses the detail it needs to identify where slowdowns are occurring and what is causing them.

Riverbed IQ observes Zero Trust environments

Riverbed IQ Unified Observability leverages end user experience metrics plus advanced logic and correlation to deliver much needed visibility into Zero Trust environments. By viewing the application traffic before it enters the VPN or CASB gateways, IT can now monitor and troubleshoot access and performance issues.

When problems occur, Riverbed IQ surfaces performance indicators, including valuable context about the scope, severity, and probable root cause. Key measurements that Riverbed IQ uses include:

• Which applications are having performance issues?
• Which users are impacted? Are there users who are not impacted?
• Which locations are impacted?
• How severe is the impact?
• How are the impacted users accessing the application? (CASB, VPN, etc.)
• Is the issue caused by a specific ISP?
• Is the VPN or gateway causing the problem?

Watch this video to learn more about how Riverbed IQ works in Zero Trust environments.

Riverbed IQ for the win

Providing IT teams with the means to troubleshoot problems within today’s modern architecture is not always easy. Many organizations resort to synthetic testing, but this only lets you know there’s a problem. It does not provide root cause details.

Riverbed IQ delivers the unified observability that IT teams need to diagnose and resolve new blind spots by integrating and correlating user experience data from Riverbed Aternity. IT teams can now determine where problems reside, who is impacted, and problem severity. Armed with this information, they can now troubleshoot previously difficult-to-diagnose issues in hybrid work and Zero Trust environments.

Here’s why.

How’s the weather where you are?

We’ve all experienced it. You’re on the phone with a contact center agent who works for your favorite retailer, insurance company, or bank. You provide your account number and verify your identity. There’s an awkward pause. Then the inevitable question. It could be about the local weather. “How did you do in the big freeze (or rain storm caused by the latest atmospheric river) last weekend?” It could be about how your local sports team did in their last game. “What did you think of the Superbowl?” or, how you feel about this year’s Grammys. “Isn’t it amazing that Beyonce passed Georg Solti and won her 32nd award? But, don’t you think she must be disappointed after not winning album of the year for the fourth time?”

We all know why the contact center agent engages us in small talk. They’re waiting for their applications to respond so they can continue helping us with the transaction or query we’re trying to make. It’s easy to be frustrated with them, but it’s not their fault. Poor performing applications—whether CRM, or EHR, or inventory—have a negative impact on both customer experience and employee experience. I wonder whether AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT will be programmed to ask us these types of innocuous questions to fill up the time taken by slow performing business applications. Even they can, IT organizations will still need to augment ChatGPT with Digital Experience Management.

Employee experience and customer experience are tightly connected

The interaction between customers and employees in the contact center scenario shows the tight connection between employee experience and customer experience. Both types of digital experience depend on the technology, the applications and infrastructure, that connect the user journeys of employees and customers. A poor experience in one area causes a poor experience in the other. Especially for industries that rely on omni-channel interactions with customers or patients or citizens. Digital Experience Management is required to deliver excellent customer experience and employee experience, even with the advent of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT and Digital Experience Management for customer experience

Here’s the first example: While LLM-powered chatbots like ChatGPT will certainly be of value to guide customers along their intended journeys, ChatGPT will be able to answer many of the expected (and even unexpected) questions that customers have when they interact with a company. However, it won’t be able to answer all the questions that businesses have around ensuring an excellent customer experience. Organizations will continue to rely on Digital Experience Management to answer questions like:

• What are the most prevalent user journey paths taken across my website?
• What steps in the customer journey are taking too long?
• What is the business impact of slow-loading web pages, in terms of revenue or abandonment rate?
• What is the projected business benefit if we invest to improve page performance by 2 seconds?

Riverbed’s Digital Experience Management platform, Riverbed Aternity addresses the questions and more through Aternity User Journey Intelligence. Watch this short video to see it in action:

ChatGPT and Digital Experience Management for employee experience

While ChatGPT will prove to be a useful tool for contact center staff to leverage in their interactions with customers, it won’t help eliminate the cause of poor application performance. Small talk about the weather, sports, or culture will still be required. I suppose ChatGPT can certainly help there too! But IT teams will still require Digital Experience Management products like Riverbed Aternity to proactively identify and resolve issues associated with the full range of business-critical applications on which employees rely. With Aternity, companies can establish Experience Level Agreements based on targets for response time for the most common business processes employees do. Things like looking up a customer record, processing a claim, or checking inventory.

Here’s another short video:

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As you think about incorporating ChatGPT into your customer service strategy, also think about how Digital Experience Management can help you achieve your goals. Unlike other vendor’s products, Riverbed Aternity delivers full-spectrum digital experience management, by contextualizing data across every enterprise endpoint, app and transaction to inform remediation, drive down costs and improve productivity. To see how Aternity can help you on your journey to improve digital experience, register to begin a Riverbed Demo today.

In a remote work or work-from-anywhere environment, the responsibility of identifying and troubleshooting access and performance issues still falls on the network team. When it comes to remote workers, Level 1-2 techs need to be able to identify network access and performance issues for end users accessing business applications.

They need to be able to:

• Understand the scope and severity of the issue so that they can prioritize appropriately and understand if they need to escalate to level 3.
• Understand the impact on end users so that they can document and communicate the incident to the affected end users.
• Understand the cause of the issue so they can know which resources to call (ISP, CASB supplier, application owner, Security team, device issue, etc.) and understand when the issue might be resolved.

However, the problem space has changed. There are several environmental challenges that limit NetOps visibility into application performance.

Remote work visibility challenges for NetOps teams

Split Tunnels

In modern remote work environments, it’s common to have three different routing options for traffic: direct to internet (no tunnel), corporate VPN, and a Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB). There are often routing rules in place where specific applications use one route (such as the CASB) and other applications go direct to internet. The routing or tunnel being used can have a significant impact on application performance and end user experience.

CASBs

CASBs are widely adopted and create a bottleneck for performance while optimizing for security. CASBs are often implemented by the security team. They make it more difficult for the network team to troubleshoot as the tunnels add complexity and reduce visibility through encryption of traffic. In a few ad hoc tests, CASB bandwidth is as low as 3Mbps and there is added security scanning time for an additional slowdown.

Multiple Gateways

There are typically multiple gateways being used by each type of tunnel. For example, users in the northeast united states may have CASB traffic tunneled to gateway X, while users in central US are connecting to gateway Y. If only one gateway is causing problems, it’s difficult to determine that. This gateway issue is also applicable to corporate VPNs.

SaaS vs Corporate Applications

The percentage of companies using SaaS to meet their software needs is steadily increasing, with 80% of companies relying on SaaS apps in 2022. Whereas the remaining corporate applications are usually hosted in a data center. Remote user traffic traverses a physical network which can cause additional slowdown. This is still the responsibility of the network team to diagnose.

ISP Variables

Remote workers typically use their own ISP. This variability is an additional challenge when trying to identify root cause.

Home Network Variables

Remote workers are also responsible for their home network. Variables such as poor Wi-Fi or congestion on the home network is an additional challenge when trying to identify root cause.

Many Locations

Finally, in remote work environments, location is less specific than with on-premises users. There may be users in a general geographic area that are having issues due to an ISP or gateway, but it is not as easy to use a specific site or location to identify problems.

Riverbed IQ brings visibility to remote work

By adding Aternity end user experience metrics to Riverbed IQ, Riverbed’s SaaS-based unified observability solution, NetOps teams gain basic visibility into traffic that leave the home computer and goes to a data center or SaaS application.

IT teams can now answer problems such as:

• Which applications are having network performance issues?
• How many users are impacted? And how severe is the impact?
• How are the impacted users accessing the application? (CASB, VPN, Direct to internet)
• Which locations are affected?
• What’s causing the problem? Is the CASB / VPN causing the problem? Or a specific gateway? Is it an ISP problem, a VPN problem, or a problem with the user’s device itself?

Visit this page to learn more about how Riverbed IQ helps organizations shift left.

When employees work from an office, the network team is responsible for application access and network transport issues, and has access to a mature toolset to help identify and resolve issues. As work from anywhere proliferates, the responsibility for identifying and troubleshooting remote issues in these new direct-to-cloud environments still falls within the network teams’ domain. Yet, because of the new blind spots, they lack the visibility to be effective.

When it comes to hybrid work, Level 1-2 techs need to be able to identify network access and performance issues for end users accessing business applications. They need to be able to understand:

• The scope and severity of the issue so that they can prioritize appropriately and understand if they need to escalate to level 3.
• The impact on end users so that they can document and communicate the incident to the affected end users.
• The cause of the issue so they can know which resources to call (ISP, CASB supplier, application owner, security team, device issue, etc.) and understand when the issue might be resolved.

However, the problem space has changed. There are several environmental challenges that limit NetOps visibility into application performance.

Hybrid work visibility challenges for NetOps teams

Split Tunnels

In modern hybrid work environments, it’s common to have three different routing options for traffic: direct to internet, VPN, or through a security broker such as a CASB or ZTNA. There are often routing rules established where specific applications use one route (such as the CASB) and other applications go direct to the internet. The routing or tunnel being used can have a significant impact on application performance and end user experience.

CASB

CASBs are widely adopted and create a bottleneck for performance while optimizing for security. CASBs are often implemented by the security team. They make it more difficult for the network team to troubleshoot as the tunnels add complexity and reduce visibility through encryption of traffic. In a few ad hoc tests, CASB bandwidth is as low as 3Mbps and there is added security scanning time for an additional slowdown.

Multiple gateways

There are typically multiple gateways being used by each type of tunnel. For example, users in the northeast United States may have CASB traffic tunneled to gateway X, while users in central United States are connecting to gateway Y. If only one gateway is causing problems, it is difficult to determine that. This gateway issue is also applicable to corporate VPNs.

SaaS vs corporate applications

The percentage of companies using SaaS to meet their software needs is steadily increasing, with 80% of companies relying on SaaS apps in 2022. The remaining corporate applications are usually hosted in a data center. Remote user traffic traverses a physical network which can cause additional slowdown. This is still the responsibility of the network team to diagnose.

ISP variables

Remote workers typically use their own ISP. This variability is an additional challenge when trying to identify root cause.

Home network variables

Remote workers are typically responsible for their home network. Variables such as poor Wi-Fi or congestion on the home network are an additional challenge when trying to identify root cause.

Many locations

Finally, in hybrid work environments, location is less specific than with on-premises users. There may be users in a general geographic area that are having issues due to an ISP or gateway, but it is not as easy to use a specific site or location to identify problems.

Riverbed IQ brings visibility to hybrid work

By adding Riverbed Aternity end user experience metrics to Riverbed IQ, Riverbed’s SaaS-based unified observability solution, NetOps teams can gain visibility into traffic that leaves the home computer and goes to a data center or SaaS application.

IT teams can now answer questions like:

• Which applications are having network performance issues?
• How many users are impacted, and how severe is the impact?
• How are the impacted users accessing the application? (VPN, Direct to internet)
• Which locations are affected?

To learn more about how Riverbed IQ helps organizations shift left, visit this page.

Often related to the remote work issue is SSE (Security Service Edge), which security teams use to secure cloud computing, edge computing and remote work. SSE is the security portion of SASE (Secure Access Service Edge). Its capabilities include access control, threat protection, data security, security monitoring, and acceptable use control.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have adopted a strategy to unify web, cloud services and private application access from a single vendor’s SSE platform.

The problem with both remote work and security service edge is that monitoring network performance is extremely difficult by traditional means. Riverbed customers have voiced that the security team uses SSE to build tunnels upon tunnels, making it next to impossible to figure out where slowdowns are occurring. This is why we announced the next release of Riverbed IQ unified observability service.

Riverbed IQ supports Riverbed Aternity

Customers need to know when connectivity or transport issues are affecting performance, regardless of where the user is located or which type of application they are using (data center, cloud, or SaaS app). With the integration of Riverbed Aternity, Riverbed IQ unified observability surfaces impactful incidents from both physical networks, remote work environments, cloud apps, as well as SSE-protected apps.

This release adds the first of the Aternity metrics, specifically Application-Location and Application-Activity data. Application-level metrics are native and derived high-level metrics associated with application performance from the user perspective. Activity-level metrics provide detailed metrics associated with the “activities” that comprise an application, such as download a Salesforce report. Activity-level metrics offer excellent visibility into issues affecting a specific activity or part of an application.

Riverbed IQ leverages these metrics to identify performance problems where hybrid work or SSE tunneling is involved. It includes details regarding where the problems are occurring, the user impact, and problem severity, including:

• Which applications are having network performance issues?
• How severe is the impact?
• How many users are impacted?
• Which locations are impacted?
• How are the impacted users accessing the application? CASB, VPN, Direct to internet?
• Is the issue caused by a specific ISP or VPN?

Read the solution brief on Monitoring Remote Work and SSE Environments.

Third-party integrations

Importing/exporting third-party data is the number one question asked about Riverbed IQ. Riverbed IQ now allows customers to use data from any third-party solution with a public REST API. Riverbed IQ can pull third-party data into its runbooks for use in decision branches to make decisions based on this data or to add visualizations to impact summaries to tailor the automated investigations to an organization’s specific troubleshooting processes.

Alternatively, Riverbed IQ runbooks can push incident data to third-party solutions. For example, Riverbed IQ can send context-rich, actionable alerts to solutions like Slack or ServiceNow for consolidated alerting.

Check out the solution brief on how Riverbed IQ’s third-party integrations work.

Other important new features

Riverbed IQ has achieved SOC2 Type II and ISO 27001 security certifications. These certifications give organizations confidence that Riverbed IQ has the policies, procedures, and technology to keep their data secure and private. Lastly, Riverbed IQ is now also hosted in Frankfurt, Germany to support our European customers.

More info

Powered by full-fidelity telemetry and leveraging a combination of AI/ML and workflow automation, Riverbed IQ unified observability service detects business-impacting events while facilitating fast, efficient problem diagnosis. Visit this page for more information on Riverbed IQ or, to start a free trial, click here.

SD-WAN’s impact

SD-WAN has become an ubiquitous technology. Today, SD-WAN has mostly replaced traditional wide area network infrastructure. It helps improve WAN fault tolerance, makes cloud connectivity easier, and addresses the difficulty in managing geographically spread-out network devices. However, though SD-WAN excels in these areas, it falls short in alleviating performance issues, and this is where application acceleration shines.

The benefits and shortfalls of SD-WAN

SD-WAN is very effective at monitoring link performance and determining the best paths for a specific application. This capability was a great step forward in wide area networking a few years ago, and today it goes without saying that a branch would have two or possibly three WAN connections for fault tolerance and path diversity. Typically, these would be lower cost connections such as broadband or locally available fiber.

An SD-WAN controller uses various methods to monitor link performance and make automatic decisions based on policies and thresholds regarding which path a specific application should use. For example, if an application requires no more than 150ms of jitter, and a particular link reports more than 150ms of jitter, the SD-WAN can dynamically swing traffic to another path. However, paths selected by SD-WAN can adversely affect latency and therefore application performance.

Application acceleration addresses the underlying WAN related TCP behavior which typically adversely affects application performance. Therefore, these technologies, when working together, provide the most robust and performant application delivery method possible.

Latency and server turns

Beyond a hard-down or significant packet loss the biggest threat to an application’s performance, and therefore the end-user experience, is latency. In basic terms, latency is, the amount of time it takes for a packet to go from a source to its destination. The time it takes depends on a variety of factors, driven by the path traveled by packets. So, improving latency, or in other words, decreasing the amount of time it takes to go from source to destination, is not something that can be done by adding bandwidth.

Packets traverse a network close to the speed of light, but they often get held up by security devices inspecting that traffic for threats or router queues as a result of traffic shaping. This applies to any endpoint, whether it’s an end-user at home, a server in a private data center, a virtual server instance in public cloud, or even an application delivered by a SaaS provider.

What is worse is that applications poorly using TCP and causing even a 1 millisecond increase in one-way latency has been known to debilitate certain applications. Therefore, it is crucial that alongside excellent WAN resiliency with SD-WAN, we must still solve for latency.

Application Acceleration and bandwidth

If you had unlimited bandwidth, would that provide better experience for your users? The answer as in most cases, depends on the situation. However, in demanding situations such as heavy and long file transfer sessions, Application Acceleration can make your application WAN link behave almost like a LAN. So, when it is most needed, our Riverbed customers have been utilizing our acceleration solutions in various form factors—branch to branch, branch to data center, data center to data center, and SaaS to end-users.

Better together, quantitatively

With a setup like the one below, one end in AWS utilizing our Flex VNF SD-WAN solution and the other on-prem using our SteelConnect EX appliance, we have realized performance benefits particularly for bulky file transfers.

In our performance testing of various large file sizes, we have achieved up to six times improvement in file transfer times. The typical benefits we usually achieve with WAN Optimization independent of SD-WAN deployments are also available when SD-WAN and WAN-OPT are service chained together.

Looking closely at the graph below, starting with the the left most bar “SteelConnect-Ex only” indicates the time taken for a large file (non-compressible binary) transferred over 100Mbps over a 160ms without any optimization. Next, as a test end machines’ TCP buffers were adjusted to match bandwidth delay product a bit better, we can see some improvements. Next on the graph, WAN-OPT is enabled using SteelHead but not much has improved in terms of file transfer times just yet. However, a compressible version (let’s say plain text file) of the same size would see a 2x speed improvement immediately in cold (cache miss) transfer as can be seen for the “Cold 2x compressible File” results. And finally, for “Hot Random File,” the right most bar on the chart, a second-pass of the same non-compressible large file would produce close to 10x file transfer time speed up or a 92% reduction in time compared to the first pass regardless of which large file was used.

These gains have been confirmed by ESGs testing.

As a further detail, it is important to note that the results of testing with increasing network RTT do correlate with intuition, without WAN-OPT increasing latency almost parabolically related to longer file transfer times. The bottom two lines are hot and cold transfer times for the 2GB file across various latency values. The top two lines are without WAN-OPT. The difference WAN-OPT made in time saved is quite staggering.

Conclusion

Application acceleration specifically solves the problem of latency using a variety of methods aimed at reducing round-trip time and eliminating the effects of server turns, thereby improving an application’s performance. It also reduces congestion on a link by eliminating unnecessary traffic, caching certain information locally so it doesn’t need to traverse the network multiple times or at all, and optimizing TCP Windows and buffers so end users don’t have to perform advanced TCP tuning. These advantages combined with SD-WAN resiliency provide the best of both worlds for our customers.

Check out the full Technical Validation Report by ESG here.

Your personal information being leaked or sold online is something that strikes fear into the hearts of most people. Identity theft takes this one step further and can destroy your credit ratings and land you on blacklists for services such as utilities, rental housing or mobile phone plan.

In my experience, I have come across many end-users who often accept this network failure as an unavoidable fact or attribute it to their inability to adopt new technologies. The irony is that they do not even realise that these issues can be rectified. Let’s take a closer look at how network health can change this perception and make administering care and managing tedious admin tasks easier for hospital staff.

The technology struggles in public hospitals

While we were working with the government to help them gain visibility into their network across agencies, we found that the public hospital’s staff was struggling due to network issues. Lack of end-to-end network visibility and disparate applications working in silos was hindering the public hospitals and creating friction for their teams.

The public hospitals were struggling to manage critical day-to-day functions like uploading patient records, online prescriptions, clinical records, insurance claims processing, Medicare claims, automated sterilisation of tools and video consultation. But what was the common factor? All these functions relied on the performance of their underlying network, and it was network latency that was often causing bottlenecks.

Why network latency is a big threat to healthcare 

Over the last few decades, the healthcare sector has made some great leaps in terms of technology. Digital technologies like analytics and wearable technology that can transform patient diagnosis and treatment are becoming more and more common. Bio-tech companies have invested billions to bring about this transformation and devised technologies for preventive treatments. Technology is enabling better patient outcomes for terminal diseases and common illnesses through early diagnosis by comparing historical data and new treatment methods. And while new technologies and devices are being introduced to healthcare facilities every day, their network is not even equipped to support everyday hospital operations, let alone the latest innovations and breakthroughs in the industry.

Network challenges are compounded by the fact that hospitals have special requirements when it comes to wireless connectivity. Certain sections in hospitals are designed to block or limit radiation or some specific frequencies. Hospitals rarely take into account future IT needs during the construction stage, which means they can be challenging environments for network optimisation. Any request to make changes to hospital interiors can take months or even years to get approval. Because of these factors, the way devices are configured to use the hospital network can be very different compared to other industries. That means even if you have a good network, your applications are still likely to underperform.

From where I see it, we need to lay the groundwork on an urgent basis, and a good network partner to help you do that. While helping you build a robust underlying network, your network partner also needs to have an in-depth knowledge of the healthcare industry and its limitations. You can only support day-to-day hospital operations, enable seamless communication with external agencies and partners and improve patient experience when the foundation of your IT network is robust. Anything below 100% network efficiency is unacceptable in healthcare.

When evaluating the network performance at this federal territory’s public hospitals, we discovered a concerning diagnosis. One of the major recurring issues was the delay in medical procedures due to operational issues, made worse by network limitations. Lack of sterilised equipment, delayed test results and poor staff coordination were all symptoms of a poorly performing network. The applications supporting the scheduling of medical procedures, resourcing and housekeeping functions were not talking to each other, resulting in a massive backlog of medical procedures, poor patient experience and employee frustration.

The treatment: anywhere-to-anywhere visibility with Riverbed Unified NPM

After doing our thorough due diligence and examining the extent of the problem, we recommended an immediate course of action for the public hospitals’ network. They clearly needed a network performance monitoring solution to help monitor and remove bottlenecks. They had all the applications in place to improve patient care and employee experience, but these applications were not working in tandem with each other, and they hadn’t realised that the network was the underlying issue.

We deployed Riverbed’s full-stack unified network performance monitoring solution while ensuring alignment with government-mandated compliance requirements.

The unified solution we implemented comprised of:

• Riverbed NetProfiler for hybrid network traffic monitoring. This was of immense help for the complex hospital network, as hospitals constantly communicate with internal and external endpoints. They were now able to manage information flow with end-to-end network monitoring and visibility, which is critical for monitoring patient health in real time, raising insurance claims, maintaining medical records and improving overall hospital operations.
• Riverbed AppResponse, which helped monitor and analyse network-based application performance. They could now fix issues in the network as soon as they identified a problem to avoid disruptions in day-to-day operations.
• Riverbed NetIM maps application network paths to improve IT infrastructure monitoring and troubleshooting at the granular level. This mapping is crucial as hospital staff across different functions tend to use different applications.
• Riverbed Portal, which helps gain control of the network and provides integrated network and application insights. They are now equipped to understand if their IT systems are working as they should.

The hospital’s IT team now enjoys end-to-end, bi-directional visibility across network paths connecting them to:

• In-house datacentres
• GP clinics and other service providers
• Medical device manufacturers
• Pharmaceutical companies
• Government agencies
• Third-party services, entities and systems

The outcomes for hospitals

The hospitals have experienced a 180° improvement in their operations. They can now quickly find and fix network performance problems before impacting patient care, operations or data confidentiality.

They can also:

• Minimise problems associated with unpredictable network connectivity, which previously impacted the efficiency of overworked healthcare and admin staff
• Support wireless devices from tablets to smartphones to wearable medical devices for quick diagnosis and real-time patient monitoring
• Roll out new network-intensive services, such as live video conferencing with surgeons from across the world when performing complex or rare surgeries

Even after investing millions in technology, I often see organisations struggling with the chaos caused by disparate IT applications and unreliable networks. This chaos increases manifold when we are dealing with critical healthcare services.

Having an experienced network partner can be invaluable to making sure your network is both efficient and stable. Get in touch with a Riverbed consultant for a no-obligation consultation to explore how your organisation can transform its network to run key operations seamlessly and reliably.

Most organizations have treated employee experience separate from customer experience, but they’re more connected than you think. Let’s start with the definitions.

Employee experience encompasses all of a worker’s perceptions throughout their journey as part of their organization. It includes everything from their recruitment as a job candidate to initial onboarding, to career development, learning, mentorship, and career advancement. It extends to when they leave their organization. Three factors affect employee experience: culture, physical work location, and technology. The rise of remote work and the influence of Generation Z in the workplace has increased the effect of technology as a driver of employee experience. HR and IT jointly own responsibility for employee experience.

Similarly, customer experience summarizes a customer’s feelings resulting from interactions with a brand’s products and services throughout the buyer’s journey and across the multiple channels throughout which customers interact. Omni-channel strategies require a unified approach to measuring and analyzing customer experience across social, web, mobile, contact center, and in-person interactions. Like employee experience, technology plays a key role in customer experience. Because of that, customer experience is often owned by a combination of marketing, line of business and IT.

Employee experience and customer experience are connected in an omni-channel world

Intuitively, we understand the tight connection between employee experience and customer experience. We experience this all the time through our direct interactions with customer-facing employees in retail, insurance, healthcare, or even government. Retailers like Nordstrom, L.L. Bean, or Zappos have earned strong reputations for empowering their employees to go out of their way to deliver excellent customer service. And their brands are deeply associated with it. In fact, despite its acquisition by Amazon, Zappos maintains its own brand to preserve the equity it has built up over the years.

Technology plays a key role in connecting employee experience and customer experience

A closer look at the three levels of these interactions reveals the role that technology plays.

1. User journeys: The paths that customer-facing employees take throughout their day to serve customers, or the paths that a customer takes in navigating a company’s website, interacting with a chatbot, or browsing a store. These journeys intersect in an omni-channel world. When a customer is unable to complete their journey on the website on their own, they reach out to an employee in a contact center to help them do so.
2. Business processes: The individual steps that make up the journey, such as “look up account” or “check inventory” or “add to cart.” Individual steps in the business processes may be shared by both customers and employees, depending on who is taking the action.
3. Business applications: The applications used by employees executing the business processes while serving customers, or the applications used directly by customers themselves. In many cases, the applications used on the website are the same as the applications used by employees in the contact center or the retail store or branch office.

In an omni-channel world, the journeys, business processes and applications intersect. Business applications can be the same, used by customers via the website or on-line portal, or by the employees serving them.

Happy employees mean happy customers

We understand the linkage between employee experience and customer experience, but what does the data say? Harvard Business Review published an analysis done by Glassdoor researchers who quantified the relationship between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. To do so, they associated Glassdoor employee reviews of hundreds of large U.S. companies with ratings from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). ASCI records the opinions of 300,000 U.S. customers on products and services.

They found a direct statistical link between employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. A one-star improvement in a Glassdoor score correlates to a 1.3-point (out of 100) improvement in customer satisfaction. This effect was more than twice as large in industries like retail, tourism, restaurants, health care, and financial services where there is close interaction between employees and customers. Of course, correlation does not mean causality.

The causal link between employee experience and customer experience

Business leaders tend to underestimate the role that employees play in customer experience because it has been hard to quantify. A more recent study published in Harvard Business Review took the research to the next level by proving causality.

Rather than the broad analysis of hundreds of companies done by Glassdoor, these researchers looked at a single, large retailer with more than one thousand stores. Looking at just one company enabled the researchers to isolate important factors on customer experience.

The effects of company brand, quality of products and website effectiveness were constant across all the company’s stores. The researchers correlated HR metrics like job tenure, cross-training, and skill level with the normalized revenue and profit of each store. They controlled for factors like seasonality and the income levels of surrounding populations.

They found that measures of employee experience were significant drivers of revenue and profit. The data showed a potential 50% increase in revenue and 45% increase in profit per employee-hour by improving their HR metrics from the bottom quartile to the top.

So, investment in employee experience clearly pays off.

Forbes article references Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Kyndryl

Research is one thing. Market recognition is another. And the market does recognize this connection.

A recent Forbes article, Three Ways to Improve Employee Experience for Better Business Outcomes, discussed the key role that employees play in delivering excellent customer experience and how more business executives are recognizing the need to invest in employee experience as a result.

The article features Dennis Perpetua, CTO of Digital Workplace Services at Kyndryl, a 2021 spin-off of IBM and the world’s largest provider of IT infrastructure services. Kyndryl, a strategic technology partner of Riverbed, relies on Riverbed Aternity as part of its digital workplace service for global customers like Dow.

The Forbes article refers to research conducted by Forrester Consulting, part of research and advisory firm Forrester Research, on behalf of Kyndryl. As shown in the graph, improving customer experience remains the top priority of business executives. But they also recognize the importance of improving employee experience as a means to that end.

The Forrester study shows a tight connection between employee experience and customer experience exists even below the executive level. It dives into the view of employees who are directly involved in employee experience at their organizations. 45% of these respondents stated that improving customer experience is one of the most important benefits of improving employee experience.

Recognition in the market: 451 Research

Riverbed recently conducted a webinar with 451 Research on the connection between employee experience and customer experience in an omni-channel world. I was joined in this webinar by Sheryl Kingstone who leads 451 Research’s coverage for Customer Experience & Commerce. Sheryl shared some compelling data on how customer experience is a catalyst for digital transformation. The chart below shows the main drivers of digital transformation according to 451’s Voice of the Enterprise: Customer Experience & Commerce, Digital Maturity 2021. The areas of biggest difference between “digitally driven” organizations and “digitally delayed” organizations all relate to top line business drivers—customer experience, competitive differentiation, new business models. Improving customer experience tops the list.

The next set of data really shows the connection between employee experience and customer experience. Employee satisfaction is the top metric tracked by organizations focused on improving customer experience. In other words, top organizations understand the tight connection between employee experience and customer experience shown in the HBR research. Metrics like average handle time and average time to respond to a customer inquiry/resolution both relate to the performance of technology used by employees to serve customers.

Don’t separate employee experience and customer experience monitoring 

Despite all the data connecting employee and customer experience, and the role that technology plays in both, the market considers monitoring separate categories. As discussed in my Digital Experience Alphabet Soup blog, analyst firms consider employee experience monitoring separate from customer experience monitoring.

But the data points to the need for a comprehensive approach to digital experience management. If employee experience and customer experience are so tightly connected, then the monitoring technologies used to ensure a quality experience should be too.

This is where Riverbed’s Aternity Digital Experience  plays a role. Aternity is the only DEM solution in the market to provide full spectrum Digital Experience Management. With insights into the digital experience of both customers AND employees, Aternity arms IT with the ability to ensure a positive experience for both. To see how Aternity can help you on your journey to improve the digital experience for ALL your users, register to begin a Riverbed Demo today.

What is Digital Employee Experience (DEX)?

Companies use email surveys to learn how users feel about their IT services. As the digitalization of many work processes makes IT increasingly important, it is mandatory for IT to perform well in these surveys. However, surveys are only ever a snapshot, which makes monitoring the Digital Employee Experience (DEX) increasingly important.

In these situations, the user’s experience is directly measured on the device itself (for example, a laptop or desktop). The focus is not on checking whether the end device is technically busy or functioning properly. The question is whether users can work fluidly with the applications. It should also be analyzed whether digitized work processes in the applications are perhaps too cumbersome or simply take too long.

Make workflows and digitized work processes visible

At my bank this year, I experienced firsthand what it means when workflows in applications are broken. In my case, it took far too long:  I actually just wanted to open a depot for my daughter so that I could regularly save for an ETF fund. Our bank has digitized the entire process so that all compliance aspects are met, and the bank advisor doesn’t forget a single point.

One would think that opening a depot should therefore be quick. However, the system had several problems:

Since my daughter is still a minor, permission from my wife and me had to be entered beforehand. This meant that our bank advisor had to fill out additional forms digitally. This sounds easier than it was, as something didn’t work in almost every form or took an extremely long time to save. In the end, I was at the bank for over an hour to open a simple depot.

Why is a broken workflow not only an IT issue?

Now, looking at this experience in more detail, some problems are obvious:

• Very few customers are willing to wait that long and might consider switching banks next time.
• Faulty workflows or processes don’t just put a strain on IT. Our bank advisor was more than uncomfortable that this didn’t work and she had to apologize to the customer.
• Digitization should simplify processes and accelerate them, especially in times of a shortage of skilled workers. The goal should be to enable existing employees to do their jobs better and faster. If this isn’t taken into account, productivity will decrease as a result of digitization instead of continuing to rise.
• Since internal support processes sometimes take a very long time, the relevant IT employees or application managers are notified of these problems far too late. Often, support tickets are no longer opened because the employee concerned does not have the time.

Making workflows technically visible

In our Riverbed portfolio, there are two products that can make workflows visible:

Riverbed Aternity is suitable for any type of application (e.g. a classic application or web application) used by employees:

Watch Video

Riverbed UJI (User Journey Intelligence) is a solution for web applications that helps you understand how people (both internal and external) use them:

Watch Video

In principle, Riverbed can therefore make workflows visible from any application. In the simplest case, for example, it monitors how long it takes to open the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. The example with my bank is a complex case where several pieces of information from a workflow need to be monitored. An error message is displayed, for example, showing “Form A” has been used and how the user got into this form. At the same time, it is also possible to record how long it takes to save the form.

An important aspect is that the measurements provide context to technical elements in order to determine where a fault lies, if any. Not every problem is due to a problem in the application. IT has become so complex that the end device itself, the network or components in the data center/cloud can also be the cause of a poor experience. That’s why Riverbed combines experience and workflow data with technical data from different perspectives.

EMA Value Leader 2022

In light of this, EMA has ranked us as a Value Leader in the EMA Radar for Digital Employee Experience this year (2022).

If you like what you see and want to try it out for yourself, you can download a free trial here to experience it firsthand. Talk to us if you have any questions!

While on our summer vacation this year with our Volkswagen Van (“Bulli”), the engine warning light came on. Unfortunately, it was still over 700 km to our destination in the south of France. Everyone has experienced something like this, and everyone has the same questions: What does this mean now? Do we have to stop? Where can we find a Volkswagen garage in France, or might we even make it to our destination? Or, do we even have to stop immediately?

And furthermore, what does an engine warning light have to do with IT and monitoring?

How an engine warning light relates to IT and monitoring

If you think about it, we encounter situations just like this in IT as well. Usually when a “warning light” goes on somewhere in an organization, this information is immediately sent to the IT staff responsible for resolving the issue, at which time very similar questions arise as the ones asked on our vacation: What does this mean? Has something completely failed? What effect does this error message now have for the company, our employees and customers?

As with a car, troubleshooting now begins. In modern vehicles, fault diagnosis can almost only be done by the manufacturer or an authorized partner. What is always the same, however, is that a specialist must now evaluate this error message, request further information and data, and then diagnose it either using their expertise or a knowledge base. If a diagnosis is not possible, further specialists or the manufacturer must analyze the problem. Once the diagnosis is ensured, then work can be done to resolve the problem.

How can diagnosis time be reduced?

When an IT failure has an impact on the productivity of employees, or even on customers, a diagnosis must be made as quickly as possible so that a solution can be implemented right away. This is called reducing MTTR (Mean-Time-To-Repair). But how can this be achieved?

Usually, the most difficult challenge in the entire process is making a quick and correct diagnosis. This requires expertise, knowledge of one’s own environment, a structured approach and a lot of experience. Only experienced and specialized employees can use targeted questions to gather all the information needed for a rapid search for the cause—and this is where Riverbed IQ comes into play.

Riverbed IQ, Riverbed’s cloud-native, SaaS-delivered unified observability solution, automatically analyzes problems before any IT staff receive a report. In this process, the “expertise” of the staff is transferred into Riverbed IQ via a low-code UI. The result is a dashboard/report that contains all the necessary information about a problem, so IT engineers can diagnose it faster, without having to do extensive research.

Get results faster with fewer clicks

Riverbed IQ enables IT departments to work very much in the same way as authorized car repair garages. Car manufacturers have transferred their expertise to the diagnostic systems so that the engineers receive a pre-analyzed evaluation of a fault or issue in order to quickly start repairing the vehicle. In some cases, car manufacturers also refer directly to a “knowledge base article” on how to resolve the problem.

While Riverbed IQ isn’t quite there yet, Riverbed is already working on the next stage to have problems resolved automatically. Until then, Riverbed IQ has one goal: to keep IT staff from “digging” through a large amount of dashboards and data for a solution. In order to save time and resolve issues faster, IT will pre-analyze problems, much like garages do.

Watch the video below to see how Riverbed IQ reduces alert fatigue and Mean-Time-To-Repair:

If you like what you see and want to try it out for yourself, you can download a free trial here to experience it firsthand. Talk to us if you have any questions!

Visibility into customer experience all along the customer journey

Customer expectations around excellent service have risen over the past twelve months. In fact, a 451 Research survey shows that 86% of companies surveyed report an increase in customer expectations. (Source: 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise: Customer Experience & Commerce, Merchant Study 2022). Despite fears of recession, or perhaps because of them, companies must maintain their focus on customer experience in order to grow their business.

Organizations need actionable insights into the impact of IT performance on revenue, order fulfillment, and customer abandonment to improve customer experience. They also need visibility into the digital experience across the entire journey–from navigating unique paths across digital services on websites to interacting with employees in the contact center, branch, store, or back office.

Contact centers are on the front line

Today’s contact centers are metrics-driven departments focused on continuously improving the customer experience. From customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores to first call resolution (FCR) times, to average handle times (AHT)–the alphabet soup of customer service metrics hinges on how productively people use technology. After all, if a customer can’t complete their transaction on the portal or website, they get in touch with the contact center. There’s a direct, inverse relationship between website performance and call volumes in the contact center. And that relationship affects the key metrics. When website performance suffers, volumes rise, CSAT drops, call queues and AHT increase, etc.

IT teams need more from their monitoring tools

Omni-channel strategies create a seamless experience for customers, but underlying that seamless experience is a complex infrastructure that must be managed. IT teams struggle to support the complicated combination of legacy and newly emerging technologies, ranging from voice communications to websites, to cloud-native applications, and conversational AI.

Traditional monitoring tools have limitations that prevent organizations from achieving these goals.

1. Customer experience disconnected from employee experience. Separate domains prevent digital experience insights across the whole customer journey.
2. Floods of technical telemetry. Performance metrics disconnected from business outcomes don’t help IT prioritize where to focus.
3. Reliance on sampling to deal with enterprise scale. Failure to capture every application transaction means that IT will miss performance problems.
4. Limited coverage of enterprise business applications. Provides an incomplete picture of digital experience for the hundreds of applications used to run the business.

Total experience–improving both employee AND customer experience

Riverbed’s  Aternity is the only vendor in the market to provide full spectrum Digital Experience Management. What do we mean by this term? In short, it provides total experience management:

• Insights into the digital experience of both customers AND employees.
• The impact of digital experience on business outcomes AND technical telemetry.
• Unified performance visibility of both employee devices AND the application service, including cloud-native environments.
• A big data approach that captures and stores ALL transactions without sampling.
• The ability to measure actual employee experience for ALL types of applications.

Watch this short video to see how Aternity addresses key challenges for high-performing contact centers:

Ensure a world-class customer experience all along the digital journey

Rivebed Aternity User Journey Intelligence provides contextualized visibility and actionable insights into user journeys across complex web environments, enabling organizations to improve satisfaction and drive revenue.

With Aternity User Journey Intelligence, you can:

• Follow every path your customers take on your website, converting and non-converting.
• Track the digital experience of every user at each step of the journey across your site.
• Guide users along the highest-converting paths and optimize the ones that cause drop-offs.

A Value Leader in the EMA Radar for DEX

Industry analyst firm EMA has named Aternity a Value Leader in the EMA Radar for Digital Employee Experience Management. You can register to obtain a complimentary copy of this report rating the solutions of Aternity against eight other vendors. EMA cited Aternity’s application experience visibility as a key differentiator. As discussed above, visibility into the customer journey, website performance, and the performance of the key business applications used in the contact center can help ensure a world-class digital experience.

Watch our webinar on Total Experience with 451 Group

If you’re interested in hearing more about trends and investment in customer experience and how Aternity has helped high-performing contact centers ensure an excellent digital experience for employees and customers, please attend our upcoming webinar with the 451 Group. If you’re busy on December 8, don’t worry. You can catch it later on demand.

Or, if you’d like to register for a Request Demo of Aternity, you can get started today.

In fact, the purpose of this report is to define network observability for IT buyers, so they can effectively communicate about emerging NetOps requirements and the innovations that vendors, like Riverbed, offer to address those requirements.

Network teams besieged

Network operations teams are struggling to maintain visibility in today’s rapidly changing digital environment. In fact, fewer NetOps teams are successful in their mission than ever before, with the number declining from 47% in 2018 to 27% in 2022.

Some of the significant challenges the survey uncovers includes:

• Data conflicts between individual tools, limiting IT’s ability to correlate insights across data types  
• Lack of actionable alerts generated by network tools
• New drivers of new NetOps visibility requirements, like remote work and real-time applications 
• Organizations prioritizing the optimization of their network tools so lower-skilled admins can do more problem-solving

Network Observability

The report also includes interesting data about what network teams are looking for in a network operations solution. Essentially, the most essential observability features include:    

• Data visualization              
• Traffic analysis
• Change detection and validation
• Automated escalations

Respondents also want to automate troubleshooting with their network observability tools, however they are most interested in automating root-cause analysis and problem isolation. Additionally, nearly half of respondents believe anomaly detection is essential for efficient troubleshooting.

Riverbed IQ Unified Observability

Riverbed IQ is Riverbed’s Unified Observability service, which empowers network teams to solve problems fast by simplifying and accelerating troubleshooting. It leverages these key features:

• Full-fidelity Riverbed telemetry for network, infrastructure, application, and end user experience data
• Anomaly detection (AI, ML, and correlation) to identify only the most business-impacting events
• Automated workflows to gather relevant data for one-stop troubleshooting

Watch this short video to see Riverbed IQ in action:

For more information about Riverbed IQ, click here, or if you like to read the EMA Network Observability report, visit this link.

The first EMA Radar for Digital Employee Experience Management (DEX) is hot off the press from Enterprise Management Associates®. T

The EMA Radar Report identifies and ranks the 12 leading Digital Employee Experience Management (DEX) providers. The Riverbed Aternity DEM platform received the highest ranking as a “Value Leader” and received a unique award for “Best Application Experience Visibility 2023.” 

The Value of Digital Employee Experience Management

So what does it mean to be a Value Leader on the EMA Radar? In their own words: “EMA defines value in any solution as a comparison of the strength of the platform against its total cost of ownership.”  And as far as the actual ratings/rankings in this report, “EMA defines ‘value’ as the ratio derived from the strength of a product set against its cost-efficiency. Put simply, the more users pay for a solution, the greater the advantages they should receive in terms of breadth of functionality and supportability.” 

We couldn’t agree more. “Pricing” and “value” are commonly misused as synonyms. When committing to a large-scale solution like DEX, it’s most important to evaluate the ROI of solving the most important use cases. The Riverbed Aternity platform is developed with real-world solutions in mind, including employee experience and IT asset cost reduction. That’s also why we have unique capabilities like Aternity Experience Insights, a proactive way to solve user-facing issues before they become widespread. watch Video

Best Application Experience Visibility

The Riverbed Aternity DEM platform was also awarded “Best Application Experience Visibility.” This was based on the fact that “the granular information collected […] on application performance is more extensive than any other comparable solutions on the market today.” EMA also cited our collection of “click to render” timing of actual business activities as a unique capability. Aternity supports this type of measurement in order to go beyond traditional telemetry collection and gather information that is most impactful to the individual employee’s digital experience and the ROI for the business. You’re doing to get the most ROI from a DEX tool when you can answer questions such as “how long does it take a contact center rep to update account information for a customer?” 

Our “Application Experience Visibility” comes from our support of what we call Full Spectrum DEM. This means covering digital experience use cases for both employees AND customers, as well as giving Service Desk and Ops teams the ability to trace issues from the end-user device all the way to the backend applications and systems that power them. 

Other callouts included our breadth of information collected, the easy-to-use web console, Aternity Digital Experience Index (DXI), and positive customer feedback on our intuitive reports and dashboard visualizations. Our support of these visualizations helps not only the employees at the service desk, but also application and line-of-business owners. These users may not be hands on with the tactical problem solving, but need insights into what issues are having the most business impact. From there, they can prioritize which projects and fixes should be the highest priority. 

Forrester Research has disclosed that without the comprehensive insights they need to succeed, technology leaders are struggling to keep up with business demand and enable future growth. The modernization of IT operations is coming at these leaders from multiple areas. It centers, however, on the need for operational insights to drive value-based and AI-driven actions.

Forrester also feels various capabilities must work together for observable insights to deliver value and, therefore, defines these four functionality categories of observability:

• Telemetry data is the bedrock of observability. This is the origination of all data and telemetry that an observability solution might leverage.
• Exploration leads to a deeper understanding of entities. The aggregation, standardization, and time series collection of telemetry data prepare it for analysis and processing.
• Insights surface important opportunities to act on. The application of AI/ML and other data science approaches identify patterns, trends, correlations, and anomalies.
• Utilization of insights delivers high value. The insights surface so the organization can take proper actions to remedy or prevent various scenarios. The goal is to progress from predominantly manual consumption and dissemination toward analytics-based automated remediation and issue avoidance as maturity grows.

Riverbed IQ leverages analytics

Riverbed IQ follows these four functionality capabilities to provide actionable insights for our customers. It extensively leverages analytics, including machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), to identify business-impacting events and reduce the noise from low-level or related incidents.

A quick overview of Riverbed IQ’s capabilities to set the background for our analytics discussion and to show how it supports Forrester’s observability functionality categories: Key metrics from Riverbed full-fidelity data are gathered, distributed, and accessed through the Data Ocean. A subset of the metrics stream through the Analytics Pipeline to monitor the health and performance of the IT environment and alert on anomalies. The anomaly data is then accessible to the Runbooks for no-code investigations, which gather contextual information about the incident to expedite impact assessments, troubleshooting, and resolution times.

The Analytics Pipeline receives all key metrics to aid in the detection and correlation of anomalies. It processes them through multiple stages to reduce the noise associated with too many alerts:

1. Anomaly Detection

As metrics flow through the Analytics Pipeline, they are monitored for anomalies that could be leading indicators of issues. These indicators are then associates with a monitored object (i.e. Application, Device, or Interface) to provide metric-relevant context, including associated metadata.

Riverbed IQ applies machine learning and AI algorithms, like baselining, and variance to detect anomalies and surface potential problem indicators. It also leverages thresholds to set high watermark indicators.

• Thresholds are simple “trip-wires” applied to metrics that will quickly create an indicator when the associated threshold is violated. For example, thresholds are used to detect issues like device down or when interface utilization is above 90%. Thresholds work well in situations where there is a known range, such as interface utilization. Threshold are also paired with a baseline to handle cases where high values are normal.
• Baselines are a method of assessing performance or behavior by comparing it to a historically derived baseline. Baselining is useful for handling performance metrics that do not have a fixed range, and where it is difficult to know when a performance indicator has entered a bad state. For example, organizations today use hundreds of applications, and the performance across the applications varies widely. Static threshold for latency or response time across all applications does not work, so we use baselines to learn what is the normal behavior for each application and then create anomalies when the applications metrics are outside of the normal range
• Variance analysis is the comparison of predicted and actual outcomes.

The Riverbed IQ engineer and data science teams are continuously updating Riverbed IQ with more machine learning tools (i.e. algorithms) to grow and improve its AI capabilities.

2. Correlation Engine

The correlation engine determines if there is any commonality or relationship between the detected anomalies. This is done to reduce noise. It organizes indicators into associated groupings to correlate related indicators through use of time, location, connection, and relationship maps.

3. Incident Manager

The incident manager assesses the newly reported detections to determine if they constitute a new incident or if they are associated with an existing incident. A trigger is generated for new incidents so that the proper Runbook can be executed automatically.

For more information on Riverbed IQ and how it leverages analytics and runbooks to provide actionable insights that aid customers in faster, more efficient troubleshooting, click here.

These incident details are then stored in the Impact Summary, which show the results of the runbook investigations, so all data about an incident is in one spot. The insights are immediately actionable as they deliver context-rich, filtered results that are ready for IT.  Using a broad range of network, infrastructure, application, and end user experience data to develop the insights, means cross-domain IT teams can effectively collaborate on root cause analysis. The benefits are faster mean time to know and mean time to resolution of the most business-impacting alerts.

Out-of-the-box runbooks

Riverbed IQ ships with a library of runbooks to ensure you get immediate value with minimal effort. Out-of-the-box, Riverbed IQ provides three runbooks–Interface Analysis, Device Analysis, and Application Analysis. These runbooks automate the process of gathering evidence, building context, and setting priorities for everyday IT problems.

You can use runbooks just as they come out-of-the-box, as many customers are doing. The Riverbed engineering team has spoken to hundreds of customers about how they troubleshoot, so they are reflective of that experience.

Administrators also have full flexibility to edit runbooks. This means administrators can customize or create any runbook, so it is tailored exactly to the organization’s particular needs. Admins can also create new runbooks and export, import, duplicate or delete them.

View Riverbed IQ runbooks in action

No-code runbooks in Riverbed IQ are easy to edit or create to ensure they are tailored to your organization’s requirements. Watch the video below to see how simple it is to edit a runbook.  In this short video, we walk though how to:

• Add another branch to an existing runbook
• Ensure the runbook executes specific behaviors based on data unique to each incident
• Verify it displays properly in the Impact Summary

Watch Video

In summary, Riverbed IQ unified observability provides easy control over your runbooks and troubleshooting data to simplify root case analysis and reduce alert overload. The intelligence built into the Riverbed IQ runbooks replicates the troubleshooting workflows of IT experts to gather context, set priorities and highlight events that impact the most users, devices, and/or applications. As a result, Riverbed IQ reduces the volume of alerts to the most business impacting and empowers staff at all skill levels to identify and solve problems fast. ​

Shift left for NetOps teams using the Riverbed IQ offers significant benefits:

• Reduces alert fatigue by identifying only business-impacting events
• Enhances IT satisfaction by enabling junior staff while taking the burden off the IT experts
• Improves digital experience by reducing mean time to know/resolution (MTTK/MTTR)
• Improves IT efficiency by solving problems sooner
• Increases productivity by enabling IT experts to focus on revenue-generating projects

Let’s explore each of these benefits in more detail…

Reduce alert fatigue

Today’s IT environments are profoundly more complex than in the past, with immensely more data and alerts to contend with. Most monitoring alerts provide little context to guide the troubleshooting process. For some companies, it’s has become impossible to manually investigate every alert; others turn alerting off altogether and wait for the phone to ring. In short, it’s becoming more difficult for IT to separate critical events from the noise, to identify business-impacting events, or to resolve incidents quickly.

Riverbed IQ can separate the noise from impactful events and get more IT staff troubleshooting at all levels, not just the experts. By leveraging AI/ML-based correlations to identify business impacting issues, and low-code investigations (runbooks) to automate the process of gathering evidence, building context, and setting priorities, the Riverbed IQ service provides the right details to enable incidents to be resolved by first-level responders.

Enhance IT satisfaction

Enterprises often rely on a small number of highly skilled IT to troubleshoot complex issues. These skilled team members typically have wide technical and institutional knowledge, which puts them in high demand. Frequently, when the experts aren’t available, it takes an organization longer to get to resolution, or the problem may not get resolved until the expert returns.​ And, for IT team members who get pulled into troubleshooting when it’s not their primary job, it means they are being removed from strategic projects. This may lead to project delays and cost overruns.

Riverbed IQ codifies the knowledge that resides in your experts into automated runbooks that can easily be tweaked to your organization’s requirements. These customizable troubleshooting workflows enable more IT staff to troubleshoot effectively. By spreading the burden across more people, precious expert resources won’t get burnt out and we empower the junior staff to learn faster and take on more responsibility.

Improve digital experience

Companies that enable level 1-2 IT staff to proactively identify and resolve problems early in the troubleshooting process achieve more first-time resolutions. Earlier resolution leads to less downtime, better service quality and increased user satisfaction.

Improve efficiency

By avoiding the need to escalate incidents to IT experts, the organization improves MTTR. Shift left also enables IT experts to focus on revenue-generating projects. By freeing up time previously dedicated to incident or fault resolutions, IT experts can focus on forward-looking initiatives that advance the organizations digital transformation.

Enable shift left with Riverbed IQ

Riverbed IQ is a cloud-native, SaaS-delivered, open, and programmable solution for Unified Observability that empowers all IT staff to identify and fix problems efficiently. It uses full-fidelity end user experience and network performance data and then applies AI and machine learning (ML) to correlate disparate data streams and identify business-impacting events. This intelligence also informs low-code investigative runbooks that replicate the troubleshooting workflows of IT experts to gather additional context, filter out noise, and set priorities. The result reduces the volume of alerts to the most business impacting, and empowers staff at all skill levels to identify and solve problems faster. ​

To learn more about how Riverbed IQ helps organizations shift left, visit https://www.riverbed.com/products/riverbed-iq.

This blog will dig into the importance of using full-fidelity telemetry with the Riverbed IQ unified observability service. But first, let’s define what Riverbed means by “full-fidelity.”

What is full-fidelity telemetry?

Full-fidelity data means you see and preserve every session in detail. It’s the capture and retention of every flow, every packet, every application transaction, and all user experience metrics so you see every incident. Having all data at your fingertips means you can rapidly search, pivot, and filter on any and all traffic of interest. Full-fidelity data enables quick answers to difficult questions—even if it happened weeks or months ago.

Riverbed full-fidelity telemetry

Riverbed offers a broad set of telemetry across multiple IT domains. Riverbed IQ currently supports network, infrastructure, and end user experience metrics from the following products:

• Riverbed NetProfiler leverages full-fidelity network flow monitoring to proactively identify and quickly troubleshoot performance and security issues.
• Riverbed AppResponse captures and stores all packets. It delivers all-in-one packet capture, application analysis, transactional details, and flow export on the same box.
• Riverbed NetIM is a holistic solution for discovering, modeling, monitoring, and troubleshooting your IT infrastructure. It supports SNMP, streaming telemetry, WMI, CLI, and syslog.
• Riverbed Aternity provides rich visibility into employee experience for your organization’s cloud, SaaS, thick client, and enterprise mobile apps.

The problem with sampled data

Sampling is the opposite of full fidelity. Metadata generated from sampled metrics can leave significant gaps in visibility and lead to blind spots that makes it difficult to detect performance and security issues. For example, some vendors only collect packet metrics based on KPIs. While this may be okay for many incidents, but not storing the actual packets means when you do need more details, it’s not available.

Another example is using sampled flow data. Sampling is typically employed to reduce the volume of flow records exported from each network device. While this practice allows you to deploy cheaper, lower spec’d telemetry solutions, it also effectively cuts corners on providing the complete view that IT needs for fully effective visibility and forensics. As such, Riverbed does not recommend sampling if you are using flow, and instead, encourages using raw flows whenever possible.

There are trade-offs when it comes to using sampled flow, especially for security or forensics analysis. Metadata generated from sampled flow leaves a big gap in visibility. If we consider a 10G link where the sampled flow data is generated by typical sampling 1 in 2000 packets, that means 99.95% of traffic is not being viewed or stored for future use. This also means we are only getting visibility into 0.05% of traffic flows; this might be fine for capacity planning but it’s not nearly sufficient for good visibility or observability.

Riverbed IQ leverages full-fidelity visibility

Riverbed IQ works best with full-fidelity telemetry. In fact, it can analyze more than 10 million data points per minute from supporting Riverbed telemetry. Because Riverbed telemetry captures everything and doesn’t sample, you’ll never miss a performance problem. The fact that Riverbed solutions provide deep and broad visibility, it’s perfect for providing baseline metrics for Riverbed’s new Riverbed IQ unified observability service.

At the same time, we kicked-off our Riverbed EMPOWEREDx user community road show across nine cities globally, and launched a new ‘Get Shift Done’ campaign that initially appeared on the NASDAQ digital board in New York City, and is now running on digital media platforms globally. The campaign is focused on the concept of ‘shift left,” in which all IT staff is now able to tackle jobs once only a very few experienced IT experts could handle. That’s the AI power behind our Riverbed IQ portfolio and Riverbed IQ. And this all follows our brand launch in April.

As a CMO and marketer, this has been a BIG moment for our company. We’ve been on a journey the past 18 months, driving innovation to deliver a differentiated unified observability solution to the market—one that contextualizes full-stack, full-fidelity telemetry across networks, applications and users, enabling customers to transform massive amounts of data into actionable insights. We believed we had something special—but to finally take the wraps off this solution, and bring it to customers live is what’s most rewarding.

With events starting to take place in person again, our CEO, leadership team, and technology evangelists have had the opportunity to engage face-to-face with our customers and partners to demonstrate the value of our Riverbed and Acceleration solutions. I was fortunate to travel to Paris to meet with customers at our EMPOWEREDx event, and to Dubai, where last week I attended the GITEX event, which is in full swing again! Riverbed also hosted EMPOWEREDx events in London, San Francisco, Washington DC, Dubai and Dallas, and in New York City yesterday, Melbourne on October 26, and Singapore in November.

Here are some of the things we’ve heard the past few weeks from our customer community:

• IT is now synonymous with business, and is top of mind for the C-Suite.
• One of the biggest challenges organizations face is data overload, including receiving too many alerts without enough context; IT leaders say they need greater context around the data and various monitoring tools they have in place.
• Resources in IT are tight and often scare, and there’s a need for more automation and enabling broader IT teams to fix issues faster and ensure digital service quality.
• Acceleration of apps and networks, regardless of user location, still matters.
• Before the pandemic, digital transformation was starting to take shape, but today it’s in full motion and delivering on the digital experience is central to organizations.

What we heard from our enterprise and government customers really validates our technology direction. At Riverbed, we’re fully focused on meeting critical customer needs, including delivering a unified approach to observability that unifies data, insights and actions across all IT. Ultimately, this empowers IT teams to empower digital experiences.

Many of our customers joined us for open labs and live demos of Riverbed IQ at EMPOWEREDx, GITEX or other events. The feedback on this solution has been overwhelmingly positive. If you are in Melbourne or Singapore, please join us in person over the next few weeks to experience Riverbed for yourself. Otherwise, sign-up now for a Request Demo, or other Riverbed or Acceleration portfolio solutions. We’re ready to help you on your journey—to scale IT, turn data into actionable insights, and Empower the Experience. Let’s do this!

The increase in complexity and volume of alerts is exacerbated by a shortage of highly skilled expert IT resources. Troubleshooting alerts requires expert IT staff to devote an excessive amount of time, taking them away from more strategic responsibilities.

Legacy monitoring can’t keep up with today’s IT environments

The situation is made worse by monitoring tools which alert on single metrics without broader context and correlation, lacking impact in scope and severity. IT teams have used legacy monitoring tools to collect data and generate alerts on violations of fixed or rate-of-change thresholds. Setting these alerts requires understanding the dependencies of the underlying infrastructure and what constitutes unacceptable performance. Monitoring is predicated on knowing in advance what signals you want to monitor (“known unknowns”).

In today’s modern, highly distributed architectures, it’s impossible for humans to understand these dependencies. Micro-service-based architectures spin up and down in cloud-native environments, so tracing topology after an incident doesn’t help. Too many factors outside of IT’s control affect the digital experience of an employee working from home for IT to resolve the issue. With proper credit to Donald Rumsfeld, there are too many “unknown unknowns.” These challenges have paved the way for observability and AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations). Observability and AIOps are closely related, but there’s a difference between the two.

What is observability?

From systems control theory, observability is defined as the ability to measure the internal states of a system by examining its outputs. A system is considered “observable” if the current state can be estimated by using information only from outputs, namely sensor data.

In other words, building observability into a system eliminates the need to directly understand the dependencies of the underlying infrastructure, which can be treated as a “black box.” This is especially important in distributed systems like cloud-native environments, hybrid cloud networks, and even highly distributed remote work environments.

But observability is only as effective as the quantity and quality of the telemetry being provided. For IT to troubleshoot effectively, observability must include data across the full stack, including network, infrastructure, applications, digital experience, business key performance indicators (KPIs) and user sentiment. Unified Observability not only covers all these IT domains, but also captures metrics without sampling, so that full-fidelity data can be leveraged when resolving issues.

AIOps Market definitions

According to the Gartner Glossary, “AIOps combines big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination.”

In the Forrester Now Tech: Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, Q2 2022 (registration required), Forrester defines AIOps as “a practice that combines human and technological application of AI/ML, advanced analytics, and operational practices to business and operations data.”

AIOps platforms provide insights to IT staff by using AI and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to analyze telemetry and events from across the IT infrastructure and identify meaningful patterns that support proactive responses. In this way, AIOps platforms make the IT infrastructure observable to the IT teams involved in identifying and resolving issues.

The similarities between AIOps and observability

There’s a tight connection between AIOps and observability, but they are not the same. AIOps and observability have many common aspects and many vendors refer to their products as both AIOps platforms and observability platforms. So, market confusion is understandable.

1. Similar business drivers. Business transformation is increasing the complexity of the underlying IT infrastructure of new applications and services that organizations are rolling out to better serve their customers. The integration of on-premises infrastructure and cloud services creates complex, ephemeral architectures that make it nearly impossible for humans to analyze and resolve issues.
2. Shared customer requirements. IT teams need their operations from reactive to proactive. This goal is not new. IT has always striven to identify and resolve problems before end users are affected. But the increased dependence on digital performance has raised the stakes for greater availability and faster resolution times.
3. Both evolve from traditional monitoring. Because of the limitations of traditional monitoring products addressed above, organizations are evolving to tools which incorporate AIOps and observability capabilities. Especially in response to the challenges of managing cloud-native environments. In response, vendors are evolving their Application Performance Monitoring (APM) products into both areas.
4. Common use cases. Many products in the AIOps and observability segments address use cases for DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams. Again, traditional APM vendors have focused on use cases for these teams.
5. Both are subject to over-hype. Both categories are listed in the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” according to Gartner Hype Cycle for Monitoring, Observability and Cloud Operations, 2022 (20 July 2022 ID G00770623, registration required)

Riverbed’s focus: customer pain points

Confusion will continue to exist in the market about the difference between AIOps and observability. At Riverbed, we’re focused less on the specific names of market categories, and more on addressing the needs of our customers. Unlike other observability solutions that limit or sample data, Riverbed’s Riverbed Unified Observability portfolio captures full-fidelity user experience, application, and network performance data on every transaction across the digital ecosystem. It then applies AI and ML to contextually correlate data streams based on indicators of problems to provide actionable insights.

Our newest unified observability service, Riverbed IQ automates the investigative workflows of IT experts, empowering staff at all skill levels to solve problems, fast. With Riverbed IQ, IT can eliminate data silos, resource-intensive war rooms, and alert fatigue. They can enable cross-domain decision-making, apply expert knowledge more broadly, and continuously improve digital service quality. You can register for a complimentary evaluation today.

Ironically, more and more IT experts and security leaders are recognizing that one of the most mature IT management technologies around—one that was not designed primarily for IT security work—is an essential tool for defending against cyber threats.

I’m referring to network infrastructure management tools, also known as network visibility tools.

Today’s advanced IT security technologies are very good and have come a long way in the last 15 years. They can handle huge amounts of data, apply AI and ML analytics, automate formerly manual processes to make IT security teams more effective and efficient, and they can claim to protect against a very high percentage of attempted attacks hitting networks. So, let’s acknowledge they may be stopping 99.5% or even 99.9% of attacks. However, it’s the remaining 0.5% or even 0.001% of the threats that can cause the most damage and cost the most money.

When every one of an organization’s IT security layers and tools have failed, and the organization’s leaders are dealing with a ransomware or malware attack or have a threat actor inside your network, what do you do then?

For organizations of all sizes, but especially state and local government agencies, to prevent these select, advanced, sophisticated attacks, defenders must think differently, even creatively. Because when facing sophisticated threat actors or a knowledgeable insider that knows an organization’s blind spots, all the automated technology in the world can’t stop every one of those threats.

The best defense against these types of adversaries is a curious, determined human being armed with complete visibility into your network environment. Those are the people who you want on your threat hunting team—people who are suspicious of everything, who don’t accept anything on trust, who want to see for themselves and who keep pushing to get to the most granular, detailed level of every aspect of your IT environment.

That’s when the value of network visibility and network management tools becomes crystal clear, especially the tools that use full fidelity monitoring (not sampling). When your threat hunters can see every single component on your network—every server, laptop, desktop, router, firewall, switch, port, every packet of data, all the details of traffic flow, and more—it allows your team to determine where, when, and how the threat actors got in. Armed with these network visibility tools, your team can look at every point on the network and confirm whether it should or shouldn’t be there, identifying new and unknown devices, ultimately closing and eliminating network blind spots that threat actors thrive on.

For example, the 2020 SUNBURST cyberattack that compromised countless government agencies and private organizations by embedding malware in a legitimate software update is a case in point showing how a sophisticated cyber threat can evade traditional IT security tools. The malware was designed in an extremely sophisticated way with many features designed to evade detection, including tactics that made its communications and traffic appear benign. For example, by using in-country command and control servers, the SUNBURST malware left victim organizations unable to determine if traffic was leaving their secure environments and connecting to a known country that was a haven for cyber threat actors.

This approach eliminated a condition that would have been a clear red flag. The attack was only discovered when another security company found one of its security tools stolen and posted on the dark web. That company began investigating and not only discovered the SUNBURST attack, but an even longer attack called SUPERNOVA that had been evading detection for over two years!

Another example that exemplifies the need for active threat hunting with network visibility comes from one of our own government customers. In this case, the customer was leveraging our Rivebed NetProfiler and Riverbed NetIM network visibility tools which uncovered a significant vulnerability that was hiding within plain sight.

Using our tools, the IT team monitoring the network environment noticed a new, unknown, device and upon further investigation discovered they were not able to log in to the device. This and other characteristics raised suspicions that it might be malicious. They were able to quickly zero in on the device’s physical location, which was a cubicle in their own offices. The unauthorized computer had been put in place by several corrupt employees that were exfiltrating data for financial gain.

The insiders in this case had enough knowledge of our customer’s network environment that they were able to place the rogue computer on the network in a place where it would have access to data in an East-West fashion, ensuring that its communications never had to cross a security boundary. There was a good chance this threat could have remained in place for months or even years. But in this case, by having excellent network visibility, the threat was discovered quickly and shut down within hours.

More security layers are a good thing. By all means, I’m a fan of continuing to add more sophistication to IT security tools. But it is valuable to remember that you can’t successfully defend your network, if you can’t see every part of your network. Yes, network visibility tools have been around for years, and they have many benefits that aren’t related strictly to IT security (like performance and bandwidth optimization, operational troubleshooting, end-user experience improvements, etc.) but network visibility tools are absolutely invaluable as part of a comprehensive IT security approach.

That’s probably why the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has included using network visibility in their Ransomware Guide Best Practices, which states:

“Develop and regularly update a comprehensive network diagram that describes systems and data flows within your organization’s network. This is useful in steady state and can help incident responders understand where to focus their efforts. The diagram should include depictions of covered major networks, any specific IP addressing schemes, and the general network topology (including network connections, interdependencies, and access granted to third parties or MSPs).”

That’s great advice, but no easy task if you’re not using Riverbed’s network visibility tools. Riverbed’s solutions get the job done and are the ones you want to place your bets on to truly protect your network environment.

What is End User Experience Management?

In general, Forrester defines End User Experience Management as “A set of client-side capabilities that helps operations pros manage the daily technology experience of employees by collecting and analyzing telemetry data from employee devices, apps, networks, identity, and user feedback.” (Forrester Now Tech: End-User Experience Management, Andrew Hewitt, Q2 2022). The key here is that Forrester focuses exclusively on monitoring and managing the employee digital experience.

The Forrester Wave: End-User Experience Management, Q3 2022 evaluates and scores the top nine EUEM vendors based on 30 key criteria. We are excited to be named as a Strong Performer this year, and to see a major analyst firm like Forrester understand the Riverbed vision and articulate the differentiators and strengths we continue to work on for our customers.

Most notably, analyst Andrew Hewitt writes: “Aternity targets the full spectrum of digital experience monitoring for both employees and customers, which is unique in this market. Its User Journey Intelligence capability best represents this.” Our teams have worked hard to deliver capabilities that cover the full spectrum of Digital Experience Management for busy IT teams, and it’s encouraging to see Forrester Research call this out.

But what do we mean by “Full Spectrum DEM?”

Think of it as a way to connect telemetry to business outcomes from employees to customers, and from front-end applications to the back-end infrastructure that powers them. This includes:

• Insights into the digital experience of both customers AND employees.
• The measurable impact of digital experience on business outcomes AND technical telemetry.
• Unified performance visibility of both employee devices AND the application service, including cloud-native environments.
• A big data approach that captures and stores ALL transactions without sampling.
• The ability to measure actual employee experience for ALL types of application

Another observation by Forrester clarifies that this strategy is a true differentiation point for the Aternity DEM platform: “Aternity’s core differentiator is full-stack application transaction monitoring. Uniquely, Aternity can measure click-to-render for both web and client apps, with full visibility into client, network, and back-end infrastructure dependencies.”

These differentiators—such as click-to-render measurements—continue to be a major focus for the Aternity DEM platform as we continue to find new ways to solve real-world problems for our customers. As busy Help Desk and End-User Compute teams are pushed to do more with the same (or even fewer!) resources, we continue to develop these end-to-end capabilities into our single, unified platform.

If you want to learn more about the EUEM space download a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave: End-User Experience Management, Q3 2022, or get started right now with a with a Request Demo.

Alerting overload

Today’s IT environments are profoundly more complex than in the past, with immensely more data and alerts to contend with. Most of these alerts provide little context to help prioritize issues or help expedite the troubleshooting process. For some companies, they get so many alerts it’s impossible for them to manually investigate every incident. We’ve run into other organizations that turn alerting off altogether and wait for the phone to ring. This overabundance of alerts and lack of actionable insights consumes IT’s bandwidth and makes it more difficult for them to separate critical events from the noise.

Riverbed IQ employs Machine Learning (ML) to continuously analyze key metrics that characterize the IT environment and “fits” the most appropriate algorithm, so we leverage the most information from the data. Riverbed IQ continuously assesses the run-time environment and performance to learn behaviors and automatically adapts as the system evolves.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) inherent in Riverbed IQ algorithms does the heavy lifting and can sift through many datasets to quickly identify and correlate anomalous behaviors that are then run through automated investigations (aka runbooks). Riverbed IQ’s out-of-the-box runbooks gather critical context to provide insight into Impacts (specifically impacted users, locations, and applications) so IT can prioritize and collect supporting data to help IT expedite resolution. In this way, Riverbed IQ surfaces the most critical issues so IT can tackle the most critical incidents, rather than “clear-cutting the forest” of alerts, or chasing false positives.

Skilled resources​ scarcity

In addition, enterprises often rely on a small number of high-impact, in-demand, and highly skilled IT personnel to troubleshoot complex issues. Often IT management can even name the individuals responsible. When these skilled team members are unavailable, it takes longer to get to resolution, or the problem may not get resolved until they return. ​For IT experts who get pulled into troubleshooting when it’s not their primary job, there could be unplanned impacts on work-life balance (employee satisfaction) and potential delays to strategic projects. ​

Additionally, these skilled team members have vast institutional knowledge. It is important to retain and share this tribal knowledge as these employees are in high demand and are frequently poached.​

Riverbed IQ helps improve the quality-of-life for these skilled team members, while also enabling first-level personnel to contribute at a higher level. Riverbed IQ provides low-code automated runbooks that skilled team members can easily use to codify their knowledge. Once tribal knowledge is captured in runbooks, the skilled team members are free to pursue planned high-value tasks, while at the same time first-level personnel have immediate access to the context and supporting details needed to quickly assess/resolve issues.

Data granularity

Some companies deal with the volume, variety, and velocity of data and alerts by limiting or sampling data. For example, they may collect one out of every 10^th or 100^th data point or collect only metrics. Essentially, they are making decisions based on incomplete snapshots of data. Without the full picture, this sampling can have disastrous consequences when monitoring security issues and can make troubleshooting more complex than it needs to be.

Riverbed IQ leverages the full-fidelity telemetry of our market-leading network, infrastructure, and end user experience products rely on. Because we capture everything and we don’t sample, and because Riverbed IQ analyzes 10+ million data points per minute, you’ll never miss a critical performance problem.

Hybrid work blind spots

Lastly, “hybrid work” architectures are becoming the norm (i.e., there is no longer a difference between in-office and remote users). Hybrid architectures leverage tunneling technologies to establish “work from anywhere” environments—but tunnels create blind spots that complicate troubleshooting and problem resolution.

When employees work from an office, the network team is responsible for application access and network transport issues—and it has access to a mature toolset to help identify/resolve issues.

As work from anywhere proliferates, the responsibility for identifying and troubleshooting remote issues in these new direct-to-cloud environments still falls within the network teams’ domain. Yet, because of the new blind spots, they lack the visibility needed to be effective.

Riverbed IQ leverages Riverbed Aternity end user experience data to triangulate from the edge and provide the visibility NetOps teams need to identify and prioritize network access and performance issues, the impact it has on end users, and who to call to resolve the issue (ISP, CASB supplier, application owner, security team, etc).

Riverbed IQ leverages Riverbed Aternity end user experience data to provide the visibility NetOps teams need to identify and prioritize network access and performance issues, the impact it has on end users, and who to call to resolve the issue (ISP, CASB supplier, application owner, security team, etc).

Unified Observability solves common IT challenges

Riverbed IQ is a cloud-native, SaaS-delivered, open, and programmable Unified Observability service that empowers all IT staff with actionable insights that help identify the critical issues and provide important context so they can fix problems fast. It leverages full-fidelity end user experience management (EUEM), network performance (NPM) and infrastructure data across the digital enterprise and then applies AI and machine learning (ML) to correlate data streams and identify business-impacting events.

This intelligence also informs the investigative runbooks that replicate the troubleshooting workflows of IT experts to gather context, filter out noise, and set priorities. It effectively changes the NetOps model from a reactive and woefully inadequate alert-driven approach to a more intelligent solution that proactively surfaces the most business-impacting issues. The result is that IT staff of all skill levels—not just IT experts—have the context they need to identify and solve problems fast.

Learn more

To learn more about how Riverbed IQ can solve today’s common IT challenges, please check out this Riverbed checklist, “9 Ways to Achieve Actionable Insights with Unified Observability.”

Digital experience market confusion

The primary capabilities of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) tools, according to Gartner’s Market Guide for DEX Tools (registration required, G00764030, 31 August 2022), are as follows:

• Data Collection and Aggregation: Products should collect quantitative data on device and application inventory, performance and usage. They should also collect qualitative data on employee sentiment. Business context, such as employee location, department, as well as labor cost add value to the data above.
• Analysis and Insights: Collecting the data is just the start. Products must provide IT and the business with insights on the impact of the telemetry on digital experience. Trends in usage, performance, sentiment aligned to personas and business context help IT identify and resolve digital experience issues. Benchmarking a company’s metrics against others in the industry or geography helps in identifying and prioritizing digital experience improvement initiatives.
• Action: Actions enable IT to automate the recovery actions to issues affecting digital experience, while engagement supports interacting with employees to inform them or recommend a next step. Automated remediation is a primary means of building action into digital experience management products to reduce Mean Time to Repair and improve service for commonly expected user experience issues.

The alphabet soup of different digital experience categories

Along with the demand-side factors discussed above, digital experience has become an area of focus for a variety of vendors. As illustrated in the Gartner Market Guide for DEX Tools, several market segments overlap in digital experience management capabilities.

All the acronyms are confusing. And to make matters worse, different analyst firms and vendors define the market segments differently. To make sense of the digital experience alphabet soup, here’s an overview of various categories.

DEM: Digital Experience Monitoring

This is one of the more confusing categories. According to the Gartner Market Guide for Digital Experience Monitoring, “digital experience monitoring technologies monitor the availability, performance and quality of an end user or digital agent experiences when using a device or application.” So, the Gartner definition includes all types of end users – both employees and customers. It also includes non-human end users, in the context of Internet of Things, such as gas turbines or utility meters which may process digital services. You can obtain a complimentary copy of the Gartner Market Guide for DEM at the link above.

Now analyst firm Forrester defines DEM more narrowly. For Forrester, digital experience monitoring refers to the digital experiences of an organization’s customers, not their employees. Forrester uses a different term, End User Experience Monitoring (EUEM) when the end users are employees. See below for more on that term.

CEM: Customer Experience Management

Customer Experience Management (CEM, or sometimes abbreviated as CXM) is a broader term. Gartner defines CXM as “the discipline of understanding customers and deploying strategic plans that enable cross functional efforts and customer-centric culture to improve satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.” So, it’s a more strategic practice. CXM extends beyond IT initiatives for measuring and managing the digital experience of customers. For both Gartner and Forrester, DEM is a practice that supports CEM.

DEX: Digital Employee Experience

From the Gartner Market Guide for DEX, “DEX tools help IT leaders measure and continuously improve the technology experience that companies offer to their employees. Near-real-time processing of data aggregated from endpoints, applications, employee sentiment, along with information on organizational context, helps surface actionable insights that drive self-healing automations and engage employees, moving them toward optimal behaviors.”

So, what distinguishes DEM from DEX? Good question. I think there are two main distinctions. On the one hand, DEX goes beyond DEM by adding in the actions – the automated remediation or employee engagement – that enable IT and the business to actually improve employee experiences. Rather than simply monitoring it, DEX enables improvement through a cycle of telemetry, insights, and actions. On the other hand, DEM extends beyond DEX because it includes the digital experience of customers and non-human digital agents (think IoT), whereas DEX is solely focused on improving employee experience.

EUEM: End-User Experience Management

The Forrester Wave End-User Experience Management, Q3 2022 profiles several vendors (including Riverbed) whose capabilities enable organizations to deliver a great digital employee experience (DEX). So, for Forrester EUEM capabilities support the goals of DEX. Just like with Gartner. Unlike Gartner’s definition of DEM, however, Forrester’s definition of EUEM means that “end-user” in this case are just employees. Not customers. That’s CEM in Forrester speak. You can obtain a complimentary copy of the Forrester Wave for End-User Experience Management at the link above.

Forrester also includes capabilities like automated remediation in their evaluation criteria for EUEM. As discussed above, Gartner would include this function as part of DEX, not DEM.

UEM: Unified Endpoint Management

Are all these letters swimming around in your soup bowl making you dizzy? Well, what happens when you drop off the first “E” from EUEM to get Unified Endpoint Management? Vendors in this category collect performance telemetry that enables IT to understand the state of an employee device—laptop, PC, virtual desktop, or company-managed tablet. They also include automated remediation scripts that enable IT to speed the recovery from commonly expected performance, security, and configuration issues.

So, products in this category know lots about the devices used by employees. But they generally don’t collect metrics on actual user experience—what employees actually see when they use applications in the course of their daily jobs.

HCM: Human Capital Management

This category serves as the counterpoint to UEM. UEM focuses on device performance, but less directly on the experience of the person using the device. Human Capital Management focuses on a broad set of practices related to people resource management such as workforce acquisition, management and optimization. HCM practices encompass all aspects affecting the employee experience and overlaps with the categories above only around how the performance of their technology affects it.

Riverbed’s focus: addressing customer challenges

No matter what letters are used to describe the market, at Riverbed, we’re focused on the challenges of delivering an excellent experience, for both employees AND customers.

• Enabling IT to proactively identify and resolve issues fast, and at the lowest level possible, through AI and automated remediation.
• Empowering IT and the business with knowledge of where to invest for the biggest impact.
• And to measure that digital experience, before and after the investment, to validate the impact of change.

Unlike other vendor’s products, Riverbed Aternity delivers full-spectrum digital experience management, by contextualizing data across every enterprise endpoint, app and transaction to inform remediation, drive down costs and improve productivity. To see how Aternity can help you on your journey to improve employee and customer experience, register to begin a Riverbed Demo today. And let me know how you’re managing the alphabet soup of digital experience.

Get results with Riverbed Acceleration

To meet all of these challenges, companies need accessible, secure, encrypted, and high-performing applications.

Riverbed Acceleration solutions provide fast, agile, secure acceleration of any app over any network to users, whether mobile, remote, or in the office. Built on decades of WAN optimization leadership and innovation, our industry-leading Acceleration portfolio powers cloud, SaaS, client, and eCDN (video streaming) applications at peak speeds. The solutions help overcome network speed bumps such as latency, congestion, and suboptimal last-mile conditions to empower the hybrid workforce.

The Riverbed Acceleration portfolio combines the agility, performance, and security of carrier-grade SD-WAN with innovative acceleration for Cloud, SaaS, and prem-based applications and services. With client acceleration straight to the desktops of mobile and remote workers, WANOP for traditional apps and eCDN acceleration for deploying video at enterprise scale, Riverbed ensures peak performance for every digital experience. And our solutions get results!

Our customers, like Elizabeth Harp, CIO, GHD, find our solutions essential: “Our 8,500 people collaborate on 3D apps, moving massive digital files across continents as if they’re working side-by-side. Riverbed Acceleration makes it possible.”

Watch this YouTube video now to learn more about Riverbed’s Acceleration portfolio!

End-to-end Riverbed Acceleration portfolio

WAN Optimization

Riverbed’s SteelHead is the #1 hybrid network optimization and application performance solution chosen by over 30,000 organizations worldwide!

Riverbed draws from two decades of experience in driving network and application performance over Wide Area Networks with its flagship offering, SteelHead. SteelHead delivers the underlying technology that helps enterprises of all sizes maximize the efficiency and performance of the networks and applications used to run modern business. Virtual SteelHead, which is a virtual version of the SteelHead appliance, includes pre-configured software for customers to use on their own machine if they prefer.

Cloud Accelerator

Fast, agile, secure delivery of any cloud workload to anyone, anywhere.

Riverbed Cloud Accelerator is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment that accelerates migration and enhances access and reliability for any workload. Cloud Accelerator runs on leading IaaS platforms such as Microsoft Azure, AWS and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to accelerate migration and access to workloads through proven data, transport and application streamlining. Ultimately this increases time to market, enhances employee productivity, and delivers maximum cloud value to the business.

SaaS Accelerator

Fast, agile, secure delivery of mission-critical SaaS applications.

Riverbed delivers the only cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) acceleration service, purpose-built for today’s dynamic workforce. The solution ensures consistent performance of leading SaaS applications (Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more) for anyone, anywhere, regardless of distance. The solution accelerates SaaS application performance by overcoming network inhibitors such as latency, congestion, and unpredictable user-experiences.

Client Accelerator

Fast, secure apps and data for today’s hybrid workforce.

Client Accelerator extends best-in-class WAN optimization and app acceleration technology to remote users working from anywhere. It provides fast and secure access to on-prem, IaaS, and SaaS-based apps across any network. The solution also interacts directly with any SteelHead, Cloud Accelerator, or SaaS Accelerator solutions to optimize and accelerate on-premises or SaaS applications.

eCDN Accelerator

A cloud-based content delivery platform for today’s dynamic workforce.

Riverbed eCDN Accelerator empowers your hybrid workforce by delivering high-quality live and on-demand video to all employees, regardless of their location, device, or bandwidth capacity. In addition, our browser-based, self-service solution does not require any software to install, purchase of hardware, or investment in additional network infrastructure.

Software-defined WAN

Achieve ultimate agility, performance and security as you expand your network to the internet, cloud and edge.

Riverbed’s secure enterprise SD-WAN unifies connectivity across branch, data center, and multi-cloud infrastructure. The solution enables your organization to:

• Expand connectivity options:Increase WAN capacity with cost-effective Internet Broadband and LTE to augment or replace MPLS
• Boost operational agility: Streamline network operations and drive strategic value with centralized policy-based management
• Streamline branch infrastructure: Replace conventional branch routers with a platform that combines routing, SD-WAN, WAN optimization and security
• Accelerate site provisioning: Slash costs of onboarding a branch with zero-touch provisioning

To learn even more on these topics, read this blog too!

Case study

Childers, a U.S. architecture firm, has been creating meaningful and memorable spaces for Native American communities for over 25 years. The company was greatly impacted when the global pandemic hit. The shift to remote work impacted the firm’s VPN performance. This limited people’s access to business-critical applications and complicating collaboration. Childers also found it difficult to support end user systems remotely. The company’s IT support effort was limited by available bandwidth and network latency. In addition, low bandwidth as people worked from home posed more network challenges.

The company worked with Riverbed to deploy Riverbed Client Accelerator, SaaS Accelerator, and Virtual SteelHead at the datacenter. This provided more reliable and faster remote access. By using Riverbed Acceleration solutions and achieving faster file access, Childers was able to significantly increase productivity. The solutions helped save each employee 1.5 days per week, which was also a huge time savings company-wide. Phillip, MIS Manager at Childers said, “Had it not been for Riverbed, we wouldn’t have been able to work from home so efficiently when the global pandemic started. Riverbed enabled us to share huge files with remote users that work with varying amounts of bandwidth.” For more details on this case study click here!

Learn more about Riverbed Acceleration solutions or sign up for a Request Demo now!

Quick introduction to CASBs and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps

Before getting started with the details of Microsoft Defender support in Riverbed SaaS Accelerator, here is a brief overview of CASBs and their place in current enterprise.

The quickest way to understand the technology is that CASBs are an HTTP proxy so that traffic to and from the laptop/machine is intercepted (via an agent on the device), inspected, and gleaned by policies set by the user’s organization via a cloud-based manager. This architecture provides numerous benefits that were either difficult to achieve or not possible in a traditional “enterprise firewall” setup.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps works the same way, except it also involves a DNS redirection, such as the one shown below. This behavior is what sets them apart from some of the other CASBs and why special updates were made to ensure Riverbed SaaS Accelerator supports Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps now supported as part of 1.5.1

Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps has witnessed significant growth among the Riverbed customer base who depend on SaaS acceleration. This release of SaaS Accelerator has been especially targeted to support Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps for our customers who use it as their CASB and need Cloud acceleration for its various benefits. Riverbed’s SaaS Accelerator has been tested and validated to integrate with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps starting release 1.5.1. Below is a simplified diagram of how SaaS Accelerator release 1.5.1 integrates via proxy chaining with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps.

Below is the configuration page on the Riverbed SaaS Accelerator Manager web UI for setting up to work with Microsoft Defender.

Along with Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Riverbed SaaS Accelerator continues to also support Zscaler and Netskope CASB interoperability via Proxy Chaining.

Azure Information Protection support

Azure Information Protection (AIP) is part of Microsoft Purview Information Protection (formerly Microsoft Information Protection or MIP). Microsoft Purview Information Protection helps you discover, classify, protect, and govern sensitive information wherever it lives or travels. 

Various categories of protection within AIP as well as encryption of documents and files have been validated—once the cold pass of the encrypted file goes through Riverbed SaaS Accelerator the subsequent transfers of the file will benefit from acceleration. Also, all protection mechanisms will continue to be honored while the document is accelerated by Riverbed SaaS Accelerator without requiring any additional configuration.

Riverbed SaaS Accelerator will continue to provide WAN acceleration for the various use cases for AIP and harmoniously works with the AIP agent installed on users’ machines. 

What Next?

To learn even more about this release and how to get started with Riverbed SaaS Accelerator, please visit Riverbed SaaS Accelerator Product Page and the Riverbed SaaS Accelerator Release Notes from the Riverbed SaaS Accelerator Support Page. Also, check out this blog post and the included video on implementing the SaaS Accelerator solution for your organization from scratch.

Differentiator #1: Unlock the power of full-fidelity telemetry

Riverbed IQ’s approach to unified observability begins with the full-fidelity telemetry that our market-leading NPM and DEM products rely on. While today we leverage network, infrastructure, and end user experience metrics, the future will bring support for APM and device metrics. Because we capture everything and we don’t sample, and because Riverbed IQ analyzes over 10 million data points per minute, you’ll never miss an impactful performance problem.

Differentiator #2: Apply intelligence to problem detection

Monitoring for past decade has used rule-based alerting. It’s time consuming to set up and the thresholds are seldom reviewed often enough to be meaningful. This often leads to over alerting, creating a high volume of alerts that are often false positives of an impactful issue.

Riverbed IQ removes the need for rule-based alerting by using machine learning and logic built by a data science team. The analytics in Riverbed IQ learn what is normal for a specific device, interface, or application, and then passes the problem on to automated investigations only when something is outside normally behavior and in the range of creating a performance issue.

Riverbed IQ leverages AI and machine learning (ML) to correlate and accurately identify cross-domain insights to surface only business-impacting events. It applies 10,000+ correlations per minute across devices, locations, and applications and displays the associated events by “Most Impacted Users, Locations and Apps” so IT can quickly see the worst problems and their impact on the business.

Differentiator #3: Automate the investigation process​

Riverbed IQ also leverages automated, investigative workflows to handle the scale and complexity of today’s IT environments.​ These low-code runbooks replicate the best practices of expert IT teams. Pre-built runbooks gather evidence, build context, and set priorities to enable IT teams to save time, reduce escalations, and turn knowledge that resides in the minds of a few experts into knowledge that is usable by all IT. By spreading the burden for troubleshooting across the entire team, your highly skilled experts can now focus on high-value digital transformation projects rather than spending all day troubleshooting.

Differentiator #4: Codify expert knowledge​

Riverbed IQ codifies the institutional knowledge that resides with IT experts and turns it into automated runbooks that can easily be customized to your organization’s specific requirements. These automated troubleshooting workflows (or runbooks) enable more IT staff to troubleshoot effectively. By spreading the burden across more people, Riverbed IQ reduces the risk that expert resources get burnt out and empower all IT staff to learn faster and take on more responsibility.

Differentiator #5: Empower NetOps in hybrid work environments​

Prior to the pandemic, when users worked in branch offices, the NetOps team was responsible for identifying network access and performance issues for end users accessing business applications. Surprisingly, that didn’t change when users went remote. NetOps is still responsible for identifying network access and performance issues for end users, even though they are blind to remote work problems.

By leveraging Riverbed end user experience metrics, Riverbed IQ removes these blind spots to enable network teams to:

• Establish the scope and severity of remote work issue so that they can prioritize and determine whether they need to escalate it.
• Determine the root cause, whether it’s an ISP, CASB, application, or security issue, and estimate when the issue might be resolved (for example, an ISP issues takes more time and an internal issue).
• Document the incident, understand its impact on end users, and communicate to the affected users.

Differentiator #6: Focus on what’s important

The combination of AI/ML and codified runbooks is unique. We’ve spoken with hundreds of customers who have been burned before by black box AI/ML, where they have no insight into why they got the results they did. By pairing the results of Riverbed IQ’s AI/ML correlations with our transparent runbooks, IT can see exactly why Riverbed IQ highlighted the issues it did. They can trust the output because they can always customize runbooks to their organization’s needs.

No competitive solution offers this combination of capabilities that leads to quicker resolutions, without having to escalate to your IT experts as often.

Differentiator #7: Riverbed Unified Observability Platform

Next in the list of differentiators is the Riverbed Unified Observability Platform, which provides comprehensive, standards-based cloud-native capabilities to enable Riverbed engineers to quickly create new Riverbed unified observability services and customers to deploy and administer them.

Deployed on Azure, the Riverbed Unified Observability Platform supports a suite of SaaS-based observability tools that IT can deploy quickly, administer securely, and scale seamlessly. The Riverbed platform centralizes authentication, privacy, and provisioning so IT can efficiently administer multiple observability services. It provides capabilities for ingesting, correlating, and storing massive volumes of data that supports observability use cases for today’s highly distributed IT infrastructures. With advanced AI and ML-powered analysis and the workflow engines, the Riverbed platform enables new services that streamline repetitive tasks so IT can deliver better digital experience.

About Riverbed IQ

To summarize, Riverbed IQ is a cloud-native, SaaS-delivered, open and programmable solution for Unified Observability that empowers all IT staff to identify and fix problems efficiently. It uses full-fidelity end user experience and network performance data to gain a complete picture of your environment. It applies AI and machine learning (ML) to correlate disparate data streams and identify business-impacting events. This intelligence also informs investigative runbooks that replicate the troubleshooting workflows of IT experts. The investigative runbooks gather additional context, filter out noise, and set priorities—reducing the volume of alerts to the most business impacting, and empowering staff at all skill levels to identify and solve problems fast. ​

To learn more about Riverbed IQ’s key differentiators, visit www.riverbed.com/riverbed-iq.

As a result, IT professionals spend a lot of time in war rooms trying to figure out how to solve problems and are often forced to turn to a few highly skilled, senior-level individuals who understand how to manually investigate and troubleshoot issues. These experienced experts are in short supply, and their time is better spent on helping implement strategic initiatives rather than having to figure out why the network is down again.

There’s also the challenge of disparate, siloed tools that fail to provide IT with a holistic technology to enable seamless digital experiences. But finally, there’s a solution that can unite IT teams—Riverbed IQ. Discover how this new unified observability platform is the long-hoped-for solution to the many challenges plaguing IT teams.

What is Riverbed IQ?

Riverbed IQ is a cloud-native, SaaS-delivered unified observability product that correlates data across Riverbed Network Observabiloty and Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Management to detect and resolve critical events, even in hybrid work and hybrid cloud environments. Riverbed IQ achieves this by analyzing 10+ million data points per minute. By capturing all data points rather than relying on sample data, you’ll never miss a performance problem. Best of all, Riverbed IQ surfaces context-rich data so teams can quickly understand the problem and how to solve it.

Below, we explore how Riverbed IQ:

• Heavily reduces the volume of alerts IT teams receive.
• Delivers context-rich, actionable insights that empower staff at all levels to solve problems faster and without escalating.
• Provides investigative workflows to automate the process of gathering contextual evidence.

Applying Intelligence to Problem Detection

While competing tools correlate based solely on time or keywords, Riverbed IQ applies over 10,000 correlations per minute across time series, devices, locations, and applications to provide greater insights. And unlike rule-based products that are often improperly defined and applied to single metrics, Riverbed IQ applies different models to a range of metrics using AI-powered baselining, thresholds, change detection and correlations.

What this means for IT teams: IT teams can be more proactive about identifying and fixing issues before they can frustrate users, ensuring smooth digital experiences.

What it means for the business: Riverbed’s intelligent automation facilitates quicker resolutions by providing the context IT needs to troubleshoot more easily and effectively. IT professionals can spend more time implementing strategic initiatives that add value to the business, rather than using their time to keep current technologies up and running.

Democratize Knowledge Through Scripted Investigations

Senior-level IT professionals are a wealth of knowledge, and best understand how to work out and troubleshoot issues. All too often, level 1 and 2 staff must turn to them for help in troubleshooting. But not anymore.

Riverbed IQ codifies its expert troubleshooting knowledge so junior IT professionals no longer have to escalate. It features automated investigative workflows designed to replicate the best practices of expert IT teams. These no-code runbooks are customizable so additional workflows can be created using a highly graphical, easy-to-use interface.

What this means for IT teams: These pre-built runbooks gather evidence, build context, and set priorities to accelerate mean time to resolution (MTTR), reduce escalations, and turn knowledge that resides in the minds of a few experts into knowledge that is usable by everyone within IT.

What it means for the business: It allows senior-level staff to reclaim their time so they can focus on high-priority projects that can take the business to the next level.

All the Information IT Needs in One Place

According to a recent IDC survey, “54% of organizations use six or more discrete tools for IT monitoring and management. Yet, 60% of respondents agree that most monitoring tools serve narrow requirements and fail to enable a unified and complete view of current operating conditions.”

Simply put, IT teams are using too many tools and still don’t receive the precise information they need to take action. In fact, the tools are drowning them in unusable data and signals, contributing to alert fatigue.

Riverbed IQ remedies the persistent headache of too much data. It’s a single, comprehensive solution that leverages AI and ML to unify and correlate network performance and end-user experience data.

What it means for IT teams: A significant reduction in the volume of alerts and a single source of truth that surfaces the most business-critical events. The solution reduces time spent in war rooms, finger-pointing, and excessive escalations, resulting in happier and more productive IT teams.

What it means for the business: Businesses can rely on the power of Riverbed IQ and immediately realize a return on investment.

Riverbed IQ Promotes Happier Teams and Customers

From excessive alerts to tribal knowledge, Riverbed IQ reduces the pain points IT teams encounter so they can better improve digital experiences for customers and employees, making everyone happier all around.

Discover how Riverbed IQ can positively impact your business and IT team by signing up for a Request Demo today.

In this world, a click is everything. That action comes with intent and expectation—of a flawless digital experience. These experiences are the heartbeat of the fierce and competitive landscape we all work in. And when digital services fail to deliver a flawless experience, it can impact your brand, and undermine your ability to achieve important objectives tied to revenue, cost, productivity and risk.

In this complex and distributed environment, many IT teams are finding it more challenging to deliver seamless digital experiences to customers and employees. IT organizations are overwhelmed by massive amounts of data and alerts flooding them from siloed tools that provide little context or actionable insights, when issues occur. As a result, IT teams rely on a few highly skilled individuals, who are in short supply and high demand, to manually investigate and troubleshoot issues.

This is one of the industry’s most daunting problems: how to provide seamless digital experiences that are high performing and secure in a hybrid world of distributed users and applications, exploding data, and soaring IT complexity.

Although observability was meant to solve these problems, current solutions fall short—failing to capture all relevant telemetry, and instead sample data to deal with the scale of today’s distributed environment.

Until Now. 

Riverbed saw the need for a differentiated approach to solve the challenges resulting from this IT complexity and to go beyond the basics of monitoring, testing, and management. For the past 18 months, we’ve been investing in a unified approach to observability—unifying IT data, insights and actions to empower IT to deliver exceptional digital experiences to users everywhere. Today, we’re proud to introduce you to Riverbed IQ—our new cloud native SaaS-delivered unified observability solution.

Riverbed IQ transforms the overabundance of data and alerts into actionable insights and intelligent automation for IT organizations. Powered by AI/ML correlation, Riverbed IQ’s scripted investigations replicate expert IT workflows to gather event context, filter noise, and identify the most business-impacting events to act on. With full stack, full-fidelity telemetry, intelligent correlation, and workflow automation, Riverbed IQ delivers actionable insights that empower all IT skill levels to resolve problems quickly and improve digital service quality. Enabling IT organizations to “shift left” allows all staff to do the job of more experienced IT experts, ultimately freeing up resources to focus on strategic business initiatives.

Riverbed IQ is the first service to be delivered on the Riverbed Unified Observability platform—a secure, highly available and scalable SaaS platform for cloud-native observability services. Riverbed IQ and the Platform are part of the Riverbed by Riverbed portfolio, which also includes industry-leading visibility tools for network performance management (NPM), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (ITIM) and Digital Experience Management (DEM), which encompasses application performance management (APM) and end user experience monitoring (EUEM).

The Riverbed IQ Unified Observability platform and  Riverbed IQ enable faster, more effective decision-making across business and IT. To learn more about Riverbed IQ, our approach to Unified Observability and how we can help you deliver on the click and the digital promise behind it, visit Riverbed IQ.

Have you had a poor experience with Microsoft Teams such as call drops, bad call quality, crashes or high resource consumption? In the post-pandemic world, MS Teams has become one of the key productivity tools most of us are using to collaborate with colleagues and customers. To stay productive and efficient in hybrid workforce, MS Teams experience should be best-in-class from anywhere the users are connected from.

As background, DEJ based their report on survey results from over 3,300 organizations around a variety of IT performance management topics. Register here to receive a complimentary copy of the DEJ Top 20 IT Performance Monitoring Vendors report. Riverbed is prominently featured as one of the top 20 vendors, and as a Leader in eight key areas.

The importance and definition of “visibility” for IT performance management

DEJ’s study shows that 64% of organizations have either deployed observability solutions or are considering it. The difference between observability and monitoring is not that clear.

As DEJ says, organizations need to assess their environments, rethink their monitoring approach, and ensure they eliminate “blind spots” that can deteriorate business performance. This is exactly what Riverbed’s vision for Unified Observability is all about. Check out this video to learn more.

Observability is more than just APM

The market tends to use observability as an evolution of Application Performance Monitoring (APM). Used in the context of addressing the challenges of managing cloud-native environments, observability tools can help DevOps and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) address key use cases.

But cloud-native environments are not the only highly distributed infrastructure for which IT is responsible. And this has an impact on the definition of observability within IT performance management. With tens of thousands of employees working remotely, the digital workplace has become a massive distributed system. With complex hybrid networks, network teams also need observability to address the challenges of managing modern environments.

This broader application of observability has been validated by analyst firm IDC in its recently published survey of 1,400 IT professionals. As covered in a blog summarizing IDC’s research, the definitions and use cases of observability extend far beyond just DevOps and cloud-native environments. Register for a complimentary copy of IDC’s report, “The Shift to Unified Observability.” Note that Riverbed is a sponsor of this research.

Putting everything in the business context with IT performance management

Organizations are deploying new technologies and redefining their approach to IT performance management. DEJ’s research shows that 70% of them reported that the tools they are using do not provide business context. The research also shows that organizations are losing millions by not aligning software initiatives to business outcomes. This is a process issue, not an IT performance management technology issue.

Providing insight into the business impact of IT performance has always been a priority for Riverbed. The Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Management Platform measures digital experience as employees interact with applications in the context of a business workflow, such as “process a claim” or “look up a patient record.” In this way, IT can track the impact of slow performance on employee productivity.

Aternity User Journey Intelligence (UJI) enables application owners to measure the revenue impact of improving page performance on their customer-facing websites. Based on actual transaction data, Aternity UJI enables IT to conduct “what if” analysis to show the potential benefit of improving web page load time.

Optimization and visibility into inefficiencies

Business and IT executives surveyed by DEJ reported improving efficiency as the #1 business goal for 2022. In order to achieve this goal, organizations need to gain visibility into the areas where they are experiencing inefficiencies. As shown in the graphic below, lack of visibility causes overspending in a variety of areas, including performance, underutilized assets, engineering staff costs and cloud services, among others.

Customers use Aternity for smarter decisions about IT asset cost reduction. Because Aternity measures actual employee experience, it enables digital workplace leaders to employ a “smart device refresh” policy. Rather than replacing employee devices based solely on the age of the device, IT teams can replace only those devices which no longer provide an adequate user experience. For example, for some employees, a five-year old laptop may still provide excellent user experience. There’s no need to replace it. This approach is especially useful in an era where IT budgets aren’t increasing, and the chip shortage is interfering with supply chains. For example, one global bank used Aternity to reduce the cost of device upgrades by $10M a year through a smart refresh policy.

Get started today

If you’re not yet an Aternity customer, you can explore these capabilities by registering for a Request Demo running in your environment. You’ll see how your organization compares to the market with the benchmarking insights from millions of end points monitored in via Aternity SaaS. You’ll see how your Service Desk can drive down costs and improve service with AI-driven automated remediation. And you’ll get a view of employee experience for every app running in your environment – even SaaS and Shadow IT.

Automation, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and other applications are increasingly optimising various mining processes like the flow of ores, efficiency, transport, and extraction. By doing so, they are increasing the profitability of their operations as well as making mining more efficient. But to be able to effectively automate these processes, reliable and efficient network connectivity is crucial. One of the biggest challenges facing the resources industry and keeping them from operating efficiently is connectivity.

Most exploration and production sites are located in remote areas, where there is no readily available access to network infrastructure for digital communications or operations. Whilst operators navigate these connectivity challenges, these sites are pushing adoption of new digital technologies and IoT workflows, both to stay competitive and to meet increasingly stringent regulatory and compliance requirements. This means a growing assortment of network devices all competing for preciously little bandwidth, leading to network congestion and with failure becoming a recurring problem.

Riverbed has partnered with several resources companies across continents to resolve their network infrastructure challenges, maximise the returns on their technology investments, and help them transition to modern smart operations.

The technology challenges weighing down the mining industry  

Regardless of the type of sub-surface or mining operation, in my experience, the majority of challenges operators face fall into a few distinct categories. Some of the most common ones include:

• Issues with integrating onsite IoT devices to the corporate network for real-time monitoring and decision making
• Lack of a single source of truth that can provide a bird’s eye view of operations status across the network
• Lapses in real-time infrastructure monitoring
• Meeting varying compliance requirements for operational health and safety in different regions
• Discovering where exactly to dig, drill or excavate to gain the maximum amount of viable crude oil or ore

Resources companies across the board are investing millions of dollars to develop technology solutions for these areas, but you’ll notice all these areas have one thing in common: they are all heavily dependent on having a responsive and stable underlying network to support them. Network connectivity and real-time monitoring have increasingly been used to support high-precision drilling, blast monitoring, and analytics to assist mining operations to optimise ore recovery.

Riverbed to the rescue

We have implemented NPM solutions for several customers within the resources sector to help them realise ROI on their IoT and automation investments, while also improving the efficiency of their overall operations and enhancing the employee experience. One such example is the work we carried out for a mining transportation giant. This company operates across 150 sites globally, and in many respects, are ahead of the curve in technology. They are already using autonomous haulage to carry tons of ore out of mines to processing plants while also transporting huge amounts of hazardous materials to mining sites. As you can imagine, real-time tracking of these transport services carrying such risky cargo is a must. It’s not just about monitoring their location; safety and operations managers need to know the quantity of ores or hazardous goods being transported at any given time. They also need to check if the necessary health and safety protocols are being followed through loading, transportation, and post-unloading stages.

Riverbed NPM helped them gain deeper visibility into their transport chain, so that at any given point they know the exact status of their operations, from mining to transportation through to processing.

Another example that comes to mind was an oil drilling company for whom we implemented Riverbed NPM, Aternity and Arc GIS. This company operates rigs connected via geostationary VSAT satellites and utilises SaaS and on-prem applications running locally on servers that report back to data centre based applications. The rigs operate on a relatively low bandwidth between 1-2 Mbps and high latency of up to 750 milliseconds. Despite such low bandwidth and high latencies, we helped automate the monitoring of IT/OT systems and sensors across the infrastructure, so operators could assess if valves across multiple pipelines were open or shut when pumping out crude oil and if fuel was flowing as required. We helped them integrate all their sensors, devices, and operational technology onsite to give them an overarching view of their operations with Riverbed NPM. All this information is made available to them on a real-time dashboard powered by Riverbed NPM.

The results of network transformation

Our customers say their work-life has improved dramatically. They now look back and wonder how they were operating without Riverbed NPM. Some of the most prominent benefits our resources industry customers have realised are:

• Greatly improved response times for resolving network and infrastructure issues
• Holistic visibility into the state of infrastructure at any given time
• Reduced time to identify and troubleshoot issues
• De-risking of their infrastructure
• Ensuring operational status of health and safety critical technology systems
• Achieving operational efficiency across the network
• Enhancing the precision of operational planning due to increased network visibility
• Setting the stage for increased automation and emerging technologies

It always helps to engage an expert to assess the state of things within your network infrastructure and plan out necessary actions. Get in touch with a Riverbed consultant for a no-obligation consultation to explore how your organisation can transform its network to run critical operations seamlessly and reliably. 

Recruiting and retaining the right talent, aligning people resources with business goals, reducing time spent on addressing performance incidents, and visibility into technology adoption by employees are some of the key focus areas. 57% of organizations see automation as the key enabler for closing the modernization skills gap in managing IT Operations. Riverbed is prominently featured as one of the key vendors in IT performance management.

The top IT performance management needs: correlating IT performance to business outcomes

The report summarizes DEJ’s survey on the importance of hundreds of technology capabilities. Topping the list of IT performance management needs, 84% of organizations selected “correlating IT performance to business outcomes.” DEJ reports that what organizations are really looking for is a capability that connects operational improvements to business outcomes in a clear and measurable way. The study shows a 32% increase in the number of organizations that are using “ability to quantify the business impact” as the key selection criteria over the last 18 months. Riverbed scored as “Leader” in this area, as well in seven other areas of key capabilities.

Enabling unique customer experiences with IT performance management

Creating and managing differentiating customer experiences is the key goal for 77% of digital businesses. As the graphic below shows, over the last 18 months, there has been a 41% increase in the mentions of enabling new and unique customer experiences as a key driver for investing in IT performance management technologies.

Riverbed’s Riverbed Aternity Digital Experience Management Platform takes a unique approach to managing digital experience from the user’s perspective. Through our “full-spectrum DEM,” we enable IT to measure and manage the digital experience of BOTH employees AND customers. Aternity has been cited by other analyst firms, such as Forrester in its recently published Forrester Wave End-User Experience Management Report, Q3 2022, for this unique approach to digital experience management.

Register to obtain a complimentary copy of the Forrester EUEM Wave Report.

War for talent

It’s no surprise that organizations are finding it hard to attract and retain top talent. Much has been written about the “Great Resignation” and the flexibility in work practices that newly empowered employees demand from their organizations. Survey data gathered by DEJ shows an increase of 2.5 times in the number of respondents who say that finding and retaining employees has become more difficult over the past three years.

As the table below shows, 30% of organizations reported employee churn due to digital services issues. Human Resources teams and Digital Workplace teams now coordinate more closely than ever to ensure they provide their employees an amazing technology experience. This is especially important in hybrid work situations in which many of the factors which can affect employee experience are beyond the direct control of IT. When employees work remotely, Wi-Fi signal strength, network bandwidth provided by the ISP, and the performance of SaaS-delivered apps all affect the user experience. IT performance management vendors like Riverbed help address these issues.

Digital workplace teams use Aternity’s capabilities for automated remediation to proactively identify and resolve issues before they affect employee experience. Self-healing capabilities enable IT teams to “shift left” and resolve issues at lower levels without escalating. Integration with ITSM tools like ServiceNow enable IT to incorporate Aternity into current workflow processes. These capabilities reduce costs, improve service, and enable IT teams to focus on the right priorities, which leads to better employee satisfaction.

Employee experience

Monitoring employee experience has become top of mind for many organizations, and as the graphic below shows, employee turnover rates are 61% lower for organizations which monitor employee experience.

In an era of rising wages and historically low unemployment rates, companies must take every action they can to hold on to top talent—especially given the challenges of ensuring a positive digital experience in “work from anywhere” environments. Digital experience management not only ensures a positive employee experience, but it also enables IT to proactively identify and resolve issues, even without employees having to call the Service Desk. Better service means happier employees, which means less frustration and less employee turnover.

Get started with IT performance management today

If you’re not yet an Aternity customer, you can explore these capabilities by registering for a Request Demo running in your environment. You’ll see how your organization compares to the market with the benchmarking insights from millions of endpoints monitored in via Aternity SaaS. You’ll see how your Service Desk can drive down costs and improve service with AI-driven automated remediation. And you’ll get a view of employee experience for every app running in your environment—even SaaS and Shadow IT.

The response to this crisis typically comes in the form of well-meant gestures: free lunches, or a set of guidelines that are high on good intentions but low on substance. These are band-aid solutions that don’t address the underlying problem. Businesses need to support and listen to staff and improve processes and tools to reduce the stress associated with network management. The key to that lies in first understanding the root cause of burnout and what it looks like.

Learn to identify stress when you see it

The corporate world has a mental health problem, and IT teams have it worse than most. In a survey by Harvard Business School, 84% of workers reported at least one workplace factor that had a negative impact on their mental health. Among Australian tech workers, the problem was pronounced: over half would not recommend their workplace, while three-quarters said they’d experienced stress at work that made them less productive.

Individuals struggling with their mental health in the workplace may go into survival, or “fight or flight” mode. They may become less productive, be increasingly absent or feel less engaged. They may display anxiety, anger or uncharacteristic behaviour. But in the hustle and bustle of everyday tasks, these problems are not always easy to spot.

Look beyond the symptoms

To help employees, IT leaders must start by listening. That may come in the form of one-to-ones, in which managers ask workers not just “How are you”, but also “How can I help”—and actively listen to their responses. Survey tools can help you build wider, more consistent feedback, and application and network logs can identify the technical blockers that are holding individuals back.

While your research may uncover company-specific issues, you’re also very likely to come across these common IT complaints:

• Overwork: Long hours are common in many roles, and if a network outage hits, you can forget about a work-life balance.
• Churn: With the job market stretched and conditions often challenging, teams can feel they are in a constant state of flux—particularly in startups, which lose staff every 1.2 years. Churn means lower morale and more overwork, as the team strains to pick up the slack.
• Unrealistic expectations: Timelines for projects are often needlessly optimistic, and may not factor in extra tasks, such as employee onboarding and basic maintenance.
• Manual tasks: Network and application issues are often raised via user help-desk requests because IT staff do not have the right tools or visibility to identify and resolve them early. The result? A time-consuming game of catch-up that never ends. Across most organisations, portals and tools are rarely unified, which means workers have to keep switching between different tools to get a handle on the big picture. The resulting work can quickly become repetitive and frustrating.

Once you’ve found the source of the problem, you can start to solve it

Whether it’s through one-on-one feedback or wider data, these learnings should help you prioritise issues, and make a case for the best way to solve them on an individual or structural level.

At company level, that may mean appointing a leader who is directly responsible for mental health, rather than treating it as a general HR responsibility. It might mean encouraging managers to include mental health checks into every catch-up and share their own experiences. By encouraging both top-down and bottom-up approaches to mental health, you can help make it part of both daily conversations and long-term strategy.

Other actionable steps may include better resourcing, setting boundaries around projects, using ticketing or Agile processes to break workflows into manageable pieces, and working to clarify job expectations.

Giving workers the agency to choose exactly where and how they tackle their workload is another crucial shift. It’s increasingly clear that remote and hybrid work (involving a mix of office work and remote work via both local networks and cloud services) can deliver real benefits. In a Riverbed survey, 94% respondents agreed that a hybrid work environment helped organisations recruit talent and remain competitive, with greater employee happiness among the main benefits. These flexible work practices can be a huge benefit to IT staff, but unless they’re planned properly and backed by the right tools, they will only exacerbate issues that network teams are all too familiar with.

It’s relatively easy to find vendors to address one issue or another. But, how can any one of them handle the complex set of issues you face? Could there possibly be a company with a holistic solution? Could that company address such a highly complex, multi-faceted challenge? You can dream, right?

Fortunately, the answer is, Yes! There IS one company uniquely qualified to provide a holistic solution—better yet, a fast, agile, and secure acceleration of any app over any network to users, anywhere. We are that company. We’re in the business of application acceleration. Our solutions are trusted by 95% of the Fortune 100 as well as 83% of the Forbes 500. To learn more about our application acceleration solutions, watch this.

Riverbed optimizes network performance & accelerates applications

Our acceleration solutions are based on 15+ years of industry leadership and innovation. They boost end-user digital experience and productivity by enabling up to 33x faster app performance anywhere. And, bandwidth consumption is also reduced by up to 95%—even under sub-optimal network conditions.

Riverbed maximizes cloud value

Our Application Acceleration solution can speed migration and access to workloads for multiple IaaS platforms. This includes Microsoft Azure, AWS, Nutanix, and Oracle Cloud. We also accelerate cloud-to-data-center replication flows by 50x or more through proven data transport and application streamlining innovations. Our fully managed cloud service accelerates SaaS performance by overcoming network inhibitors such as latency, congestion, and the unpredictable last mile of today’s mobile workforce for leading SaaS applications. These include Microsoft 365, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Box, etc.

Riverbed accelerates app performance for today’s remote workforce

Riverbed Application Acceleration boosts performance by 10x or greater direct from the user desktop. Workers get the application performance they need no matter where they’re working. We extend best-in-class WAN Optimization and the industry’s only application acceleration to remote users. We provide fast, secure access to on-premises IaaS and SaaS-based applications. And, we do this across any network.

Riverbed speeds video content delivery for today’s dynamic workforce

Riverbed provides a reliable, secure, and easy-to-deploy video distribution solution. And even better, we do this without the need to change or upgrade any existing network infrastructure. Our scalable, cloud-based platform speeds the delivery of bandwidth-hungry video content directly to users by up to 70%. We can also reduce bandwidth by up to 99%.

To learn more about our application acceleration solutions, go here.

Riverbed recently worked with consulting firm IDC to survey over 1,400 IT professionals across the world to determine the current state of observability solutions, what IT professionals want to get out of observability, and how they’re planning to invest in these solutions.  

This blog will highlight some of the key takeaways from the reporting including how IT teams look to achieve true unified observability. If you want to jump straight into the full report you can download The Shirt to Unified Observability in Management: Reasons, Requirements, and Returns. 

The current state of observability  

IDC’s survey reveals that over 90% of IT organizations currently use observability solutions. But when we drill down further, we see that IT teams aren’t exactly thrilled with current observability offerings.  

• 61% of IT teams agree their productivity and collaboration is limited by specialized tools and siloed data views.  
• 60% of IT teams believe their monitoring tools serve narrow requirements and fail to enable a unified and complete view into current operating conditions. 
• 59% of IT teams must manually troubleshoot issues to identify root causes and determine specific remedies. 
• 54% of organizations already use six or more discrete tools for IT monitoring and management. 

Current solutions simply aren’t robust or unified enough, which leads to blind spots in visibility and forces IT teams to waste a lot of time troubleshooting problems. 

Simply put, most observability tools on the market today are ineffective for addressing the changes of today’s distributed IT environments.  

Unified Observability merges silos 

When IDC asked the 1,400 survey respondents: What is driving the need to unify observability across all IT domains (applications, network, infrastructure, cloud, end user services, smart end devices)? The number one response was “Improving IT teamwork and productivity across domains.” 

For too long, discrete monitoring and performance tools have failed to connect the dots between disparate users, teams, and networks. This problem has only been exacerbated by the shift to remote and hybrid work which has added layers of complexity to an already complex IT environment.  

Riverbed Unified Observability portfolio helps break down these silos by unifying data, insights, and actions across IT. With full-fidelity user experience, application, and network performance data on every transaction across the digital enterprise, Riverbed can apply AI and ML to correlate data streams and alerts to provide actionable insights across the business.  

Unified Observability makes for happier IT talent   

Survey results indicate that Unified Observability and its ability to leverage automation in remediating tech issues would help improve working conditions within IT teams. Consider the following: 

58% of respondents agree that their organization’s most expert staff spend far too much time on tactical responsibilities. Meanwhile, 56% also agreed their organization struggles to hire and retain highly skilled IT staff.   

That is a recipe for disaster as organizations are forced to leverage their hard to find and retain staff on responsibilities far below their skill (and pay) level. It makes sense then that IDC research reveals IT managers have a strong desire to redirect staff from tactical duties to strategic responsibilities. 

Riverbed Unified Observability can help organizations do just that. It begins with capturing full-fidelity user experience, application, and network performance data on every transaction across the digital ecosystem. It then applies AI and ML to contextually correlate disparate data streams and provide actionable insights. With these actionable insights you can automate the investigative workflows of IT experts, empowering your entire IT staff to solve complex problems quickly and accurately.  

The need for Unified Observability 

Over 70% of the survey respondents believe Unified Observability is critical to delivering the best possible digital experiences for customers and employees. At the same time, 60% say that the lack of Unified Observability restricts the ability of IT teams to meet business requirements. And 59% say the absence of Unified Observability makes their job and the job of their staff and peers more difficult. 

Most IT organizations understand the promise of truly unified observability solutions but until now have been forced to patch together disparate monitoring and performance tools. With Riverbed Unified Observability, organizations can finally eliminate the data silos, resource-intensive war rooms, and alert fatigue that has plagued discrete monitoring tools for years. They can truly enable cross-domain decision-making, apply expert knowledge more broadly, and continuously improve digital service quality for their customers and employees.  

Take a deep dive into the IDC survey by downloading the report: The Shift to Unified Observability in Management: Reasons, Requirements, and Returns. 

How Riverbed is helping government organisations become more secure

Downtime can be catastrophic

No one is safe from network outages. Apple, the BBC, Coinbase and Reddit have all suffered in recent years. In October 2021, a seven-hour outage cost Facebook $100 million. Two months later, Amazon was out of action for hours, leaving customers unable to operate their networked fridges, doorbells, and speakers, and leaving thousands of robot vacuum cleaners to twiddle their smart thumbs.

Network outages can result from power failure, network congestion, cyberattacks, human error or configuration issues. They may be widespread (like the March DNS incident that saw 15,000 Australian websites taken offline) or specific to your organisation. Either way, they’re expensive, costing larger corporations an average of $144,000 per hour in revenue loss, and smaller organisations (those with fewer than 20,000 employees) $2,000 per hour.

Cost of downtime is rising year on year. Lost revenue, reduced productivity, customer complaints, regulatory issues and reputational damage can all throw your organisation into a tailspin. A blocker to one process can ripple right through your organisation, leaving staff baffled and senior executives fuming. And panicked stakeholders will be looking in one direction for resolution: the IT team.

Network teams are already feeling the strain

The pressure to get networks running again as your organisation haemorrhages money would be bad enough if it landed on an empty to-do list. But many IT teams are already overworked, under-resourced, and plagued by employee churn. Workers may be expected to deal with tickets at pace while procuring hardware and software, helping less technically minded staff, and advising on new technologies.

That pressure has been exacerbated by rising cybercrime and new COVID protocols, while the rise in remote work demands more bandwidth from IT infrastructure and the expectation of timely troubleshooting. Outage emergencies put the heat on people who may already be near boiling point.

Network outages pile on the pressure

Network outages can hammer your organisation’s bottom line commercially, but there will be a psychological impact for many workers, too. Internet addiction is recognised as a condition by the World Health Organisation, and for many of us being deprived of the internet feels deeply personal, more like losing a limb than having a tech problem. Being cut off from networks, key projects and messaging services can be deeply frustrating for employees. That great wave of emotion comes crashing down just as IT workers need to be at their most focused and methodical.

Network outages will generally mean team members being pulled out of key tasks, many of which are time-sensitive. Forget that once-urgent project, remote work or project visibility: even employers who are sympathetic to a work-life balance will crack the whip. Network engineers may need to travel to remote sites, expose themselves to COVID risks or spend long hours desperately tracing the problem while the clock ticks and panicked communications rain down from executives. Unfortunately, at this stage, it’s not just about fixing the technical problems: stakeholder management becomes a major factor. Individuals whose attention to detail and concentration makes them relish coding projects may suddenly be roped into a high-pressure environment that not only requires a quick technical response but also needs diplomacy and the ability to manage stakeholder expectations.

Recovery may be complex and frustrating

Network outages may be relatively short-lived, especially if you have a viable secondary connection. But all too often, recovery is complex and frustrating.

A single failure may trigger multiple issues, affecting different offices, partner organisations, and online portals in different ways. For network teams, that means reviewing everything from IoT endpoints to data packets and cloud-service infrastructure to trace the source of the problem. Outages can also result from cyber-attacks, operation errors, surges, network congestion, loose connections, or cables damaged by fire or water.

Teams may find themselves scrambling through dashboards and logs to get a holistic picture. Systems may need to be rebooted remotely. Weighing up possible causes and results of corrective action is hard at the best of times and is even harder while the business breathes down your neck. Without clear guidance, staff may use unsecured public wi-fi or shadow IT to keep projects on track, exposing data to theft and opening up your network to malware attacks—and the risk of further outages—further down the track.

Network outages can have a profound mental health impact

Wi-Fi performance problems

Wi-Fi performance problems intermingling with application and network issues are expensive to isolate and resolve. If your business depends on strong Wi-Fi performance, you simply must have proper visibility into the various moving parts of Wi-Fi infrastructure. Riverbed’s promise for providing full fidelity observability is not complete until we cover monitoring for this important business asset, Wi-Fi.

How can Riverbed help?

Consider the Wi-Fi infrastructure as LWAP (lightweight access points) and WLC (wireless controllers). For these, Riverbed NetIM can provide numerous health metrics across your entire fleet from basic up or down indicators to radio level signal-to-noise ratio measurements. All makes and models of WLCs and APs monitored via a single tool. In addition, after the COVID-19 pandemic, people started to work from anywhere. As a result, at times there was very little control over the Wi-Fi infrastructure available to users. Therefore, a new challenge emerged for enterprises everywhere for monitoring end user’s devices’ Wi-Fi performance. Because of this, in addition to the infrastructure side, to get the full picture, Riverbed’s End-User-Monitoring (Digital Experience Monitoring) via Aternity provides agents which can be installed to obtain Wi-Fi analytics from end user’s devices.

Wi-Fi infrastructure monitoring

Wi-Fi access points and controllers in most large businesses can be quite expansive. In certain cases, each wireless controller can have a thousand or more access points and the provisioned landscape can change quickly with growth and changes in businesses. Monitoring the health of its various components is an important step toward protecting your investment in Wi-Fi.

Infrastructure side: inventory search/reports

NetIM is not only a monitoring tool but has also been utilized by our customers as an intelligent database with a powerful search engine (pictured below) and REST API on top which is not just a passive inventory. NetIM performs health on all devices in its inventory and can automatically identify, absorb new devices and age out decommissioned devices—based on live SNMP and ICMP polling results. Along with that, there are out-of-the-box reports to summarize vendor types, models, and OS versions of your Wi-Fi fleet.

Infrastructure side: monitoring Wi-Fi health

Basic health metrics mentioned below can be easily obtained across the Wi-Fi infrastructure using Riverbed NetIM.

• Access points operationally up/down
• Wireless Controller CPU Utilization %
• Wireless Controller Memory Utilization %
• Number of APs connected
• Number of active WLANs

Infrastructure side: capacity issues

Oversubscribed Wi-Fi channels at the radio level can seep into your infrastructure like sparse distribution of APs leading to overloaded APs. Riverbed NetIM can provide the below metrics for your APs to better manage ever-changing capacity needs across the Wi-Fi fleet.

• Channel Utilization %
• Channel Rx Utilization %
• Channel Tx Utilization %
• Channel User Count
• Maximum Allowed Clients

Infrastructure side: RF interference effects

Co-channel interference (CCI) can be one of the biggest enemies, but general radio interference can be quite prevalent as well in busy cities and office spaces. Once again, Riverbed NetIM can provide the metrics to enable visibility into these problems. I have used the below metric during my Riverbed consulting days to help customers figure out just exactly how significant is radio interference and SNR quality in various sites.

• Poor SNR Clients

Infrastructure side: client mobility

If you have WLC Mobility enabled in your Wi-Fi deployment, you will find these metrics useful, specifically, if you have IoTs that are highly mobile in a localized space. there are more mobility metrics available inside Riverbed NetIM, below is a curated list of some mobility metrics related to Wi-Fi.

• Total Hand-off Requests
• Total Hand-off Requests Sent
• Total Hand-off Denied Received

End-User Wi-Fi experience monitoring

In cases where a DEM agent can be installed on user’s device, the breadth and depth of visibility and analysis available from Riverbed Aternity DEM solution is unmatched. Below is a curated list or Wi-Fi performance dashboards available from Aternity.

End-user side: which band is experiencing the best data rates (2.4G / 5.0G / AC)?

Below is a sample dashboard from Aternity. It clearly shows the throughput of all Wi-Fi bands utilized by users, put in charts stacked together for easy comparison.

End-user side: which clients prefer more advanced Wi-Fi bands?

Sometimes clients can connect to access points using newer protocols and Wi-Fi bands. Such cases are reported in below screen in the Wi-Fi dashboard.

End-user side: which bands are experiencing worse RSSI (2.4G / 5.0G / AC)?

All-important RSSI, split by frequency band and signal quality (Poor/Okay/Good/Excellent) available in this section of the dashboard.

End-user side: what SSIDs experiencing the worst RSSI?

Who are the worst hit users affected by bad RSSI? What were their throughput speeds? Answers to such questions are easily available in this dashboard view.

End-user side: track usage characteristics of users’ Wi-Fi

Picking right metrics to view together for comparisons and contrast is the effective method for proper root cause analysis of problems. Therefore, we have a section of the Wi-Fi dashboard where we showcase the user’s experience for each band by RSSI and throughput.

End-user side: Wi-Fi encryption used by user’s devices—determine whether they might be vulnerable to intrusion/attack.

A full view of the various encryption technologies used by user’s devices is a must. For that, the below dashboard will showcase the encryption technology used by your user’s Wi-Fi connections.

Conclusion

There is a wealth of data for Wi-Fi monitoring made available by Riverbed performance monitoring tools. On the infrastructure side with NetIM and the user’s side with Aternity. Above all, this provides businesses with complete visibility for Wi-Fi performance monitoring. So, make sure you have metrics and analytics and that you are prepared against Wi-Fi performance problems that confound most teams. Wi-Fi performance problems are expensive to bear and resolve.

Today marks an exciting new chapter for Riverbed, our partners, and our customers. With the launch of our new brand including Riverbed, and a new unified observability portfolio and strategy that unifies data, insights and actions across IT, we are embarking on a mission to enable organizations everywhere to deliver seamless digital experiences and drive enterprise performance. This launch reflects the evolution of the Company, our technology, and our intent to disrupt the market.

We are capitalizing on our trusted brand, and the dynamic growth and market momentum of our visibility solutions, to drive a differentiated approach to observability that solves one of the industry’s most daunting problems: how to provide seamless digital experiences that are high performing and secure in a distributed and hybrid world.

Let me set the stage. Today, users are everywhere. Applications and their components are everywhere. Data is everywhere and increasingly growing in terms of volume, variety, and velocity. In fact, data is projected to reach 180 zettabytes in 2025, up 3x from 2020. Modern IT architectures are exponentially more complex making it difficult for IT to manage performance effectively and proactively.

Yet every click represents an activity that is vital to your organization and there is a relentless expectation for a flawless digital experience. The quality of these experiences is the heartbeat of the fiercely competitive digital-first world we live and work in.

When issues occur, IT is overwhelmed by massive amounts of data and alerts from siloed tools that provide little context or actionable insights. Troubleshooting requires war rooms and the expertise of highly skilled IT staff to manually connect and interpret data across domains. And when tools limit or sample data, IT may not even be aware of other potential issues or opportunities for proactive improvement.

Observability is meant to solve these problems, but current solutions fall short. Even so-called “full-stack” observability solutions fail to capture all relevant telemetry and sample data to deal with the scale of today’s distributed environment. Most solutions only collect three or four types of data and are limited to DevOps or Site Reliability Engineers for cloud-native use cases. And they offer nothing beyond the alert, so IT still relies on their resident expert to manually investigate events.

Enter Riverbed—a different, unique and superior approach to observability. Our unified observability portfolio unifies data, insights, and actions across all domains and environments, enabling IT to cut through massive complexity and data noise to provide seamless digital experiences that drive enterprise performance for both the employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX).

The Riverbed portfolio leverages our industry-leading visibility tools (available today) for network performance management (NPM), IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM), and digital experience management (DEM)—application performance management (APM) and end-user experience monitoring (EUEM), used by thousands of customers around the world. Unlike other observability solutions that limit or sample data, the Riverbed portfolio vision for unified observability is to capture full-fidelity user experience, application, and network performance data on every transaction across the digital ecosystem, and then apply AI and ML to contextually correlate disparate data streams and to provide the most accurate and actionable insights. This intelligence will empower IT staff at all skill levels to solve problems fast. Visit our Riverbed page to learn more and read today’s press announcement.

Complementing the Riverbed portfolio, Riverbed Acceleration solutions provide fast, agile, secure acceleration of any app over any network to users, whether mobile, remote, or on-premises. Built on decades of WAN optimization leadership and innovation, Riverbed’s industry-leading acceleration portfolio delivers cloud, SaaS, client and eCDN (video streaming) applications at peak speeds, overcoming network speed bumps such as latency, congestion, and suboptimal last-mile conditions to empower the hybrid workforce. Additionally, Riverbed’s enterprise SD-WAN provides best-in-class performance, agility, and management of MPLS, LTE, broadband and Internet-based networks.

Only Riverbed provides the collective richness of telemetry, insight, and intelligent automation, from network to app to end user that illuminates and then accelerates every interaction. With the powerful combination of our Riverbed Unified Observability and Acceleration solutions, IT teams are empowered to provide a seamless digital experience for customers and employees, and end-to-end performance for the business.

We’re looking forward to helping support our customers on this digital journey.

Together, let’s Empower the Experience.

Read more on our new brand here.

First, as you’ll see in our CEO Dan Smoot’s blog and press announcement, Riverbed is launching a broad strategy to bring unified observability to customers globally and accelerate growth. As part of the strategy, we’re developing an expanded unified observability portfolio to unify data, insights and actions to solve one of the industry’s most daunting problems: how to provide seamless digital experiences that are high performing and secure in a hybrid world of highly distributed users and applications, exploding data and soaring IT complexity.

In conjunction with this announcement, I’m pleased to share that we’re launching the new Riverbed brand, including the introduction of Riverbed, our portfolio for unified observability. With a fresh and vibrant visual identity, and a sharpened articulation of our solutions, the brand refresh reflects the evolution of the Company, our technology, and the momentum we are driving in the market.

The launch of Riverbed’s new brand identity and Unified Observability strategy comes nine months after Riverbed reunited with Aternity—which had been operating independently—to capitalize on the tremendous market opportunity around unified visibility and observability. We initially went to market as Riverbed | Aternity to signify the unification of these companies and our industry-leading solutions. Collectively, the companies’ intense focus on NPM, DEM (Aternity) delivering actionable insights on performance and acceleration have positioned Riverbed to fully capitalize in both the Unified Observability and Acceleration markets.

Now is the right moment to emerge as the new Riverbed—a Company that is visionary but grounded; agile yet proven; dynamic while trustworthy. We understand that every click brings an expectation of a flawless digital experience. And Riverbed enables organizations to transform data into actionable insights and accelerate performance for a seamless digital experience.

Riverbed will go to market with two exciting product lines—Riverbed and Riverbed Acceleration.

Riverbed pays homage to Riverbed, while also underscoring our unified observability value proposition. The name Riverbed derives from alluvium—the place where riverbeds unite and create the most nutrient-rich environment to mine for gold—with the ‘o’ standing for observability. Metaphorically, it represents the coming together of discrete IT telemetry streams (network, application, end users) where insights that are hard to find, but worth their weight in gold, reside. And metaphorically the “o” represents how we apply observability as a process to harness the value across the streams of telemetry—ultimately finding the “gold” for our customers across the flood of data in their IT ecosystems

Our Riverbed unified observability portfolio of solutions helps customers find that gold as fast as possible, turning actionable insights into business value so companies can stay competitive, productive and satisfy users’ fierce appetite for seamless digital experiences.

Our second portfolio is Riverbed Acceleration, which provides fast, agile, secure acceleration of any app over any network to users anywhere. Built on decades of WAN optimization leadership and innovation, Riverbed’s industry-leading Acceleration portfolio delivers cloud, SaaS, client and eCDN (video streaming) acceleration, as well as enterprise-grade SD-WAN.

When we bring these solutions together, Riverbed enables organizations to illuminate, accelerate and empower the digital experience. As we usher in the new Riverbed, I welcome you to view our new brand, and learn more about Riverbed. We look forward to continuing to deliver on our brand promise and helping our customers empower the experience across their organizations.

Let’s start at the beginning. First: what is Wireless LAN? Wireless LAN is a cordless computer network that links multiple devices using wireless communication to form a local area network within a specific space, such as an office. Basically, when you’re sitting at your desk and move to a conference room for an important meeting, Wireless LAN is the reason you stay connected to the closest and most effective access point.

To address the need for consistent Wireless LAN health, Riverbed has released NetIM 2.5 to give users predefined support to identify and fix Wi-Fi stability. NetIM 2.5 can achieve this through insights into access point status and quantity by model, OS version, and controller.

In this blog, we explore the importance and benefits of Wireless LAN monitoring and how the availability of Riverbed NetIM 2.5 will improve your Wireless LAN monitoring capabilities.

Why you need Wireless LAN monitoring

Every time a user’s connection falters, their productivity takes a hit. Not only does this demand time and attention to diagnose and fix the issue, but it also takes time away from an employee that would have otherwise been spent on important business-related tasks. This can cause significant employee and customer frustration, stalled projects, and loss of revenue. In fact, employees lose an average of 71 productive hours annually because of poor network connectivity. And whether you have two or 20 access points, connection issues can be hard to diagnose, especially since the primary form of connectivity is wireless, not tangible cords and cables.

So, if your network connection falters, do you know how to identify which access point is causing the issue?

Wireless LAN monitoring provides visibility into which controllers are being accessed across your device network, and which users are connected to specific access points. If the quality of your Wi-Fi connection suddenly decreases or is lost altogether, a Wireless LAN monitoring tool can find and mitigate the connectivity issue efficiently and effectively.

The data provided by Wireless LAN monitoring—which includes information on access point status, quantity, etc.—helps IT teams to answer questions like:

• Do any access points have stability issues?
• Are issues correlated with specific models or OS versions?
• Do issues occur at specific times of the day?
• Are issues correlated with the number of active clients for the access point?
• Do we have too many clients connected to an access point?
• Are any access clients down? If so, how many APs were connected before going down?

To fully realize the benefits of Wireless LAN monitoring, you need an easy-to-use platform that continuously identifies access point issues and provides proactive solutions.

Introducing: Riverbed NetIM 2.5

NetIM provides a scalable network and server infrastructure monitoring platform to help customers detect, diagnose, and troubleshoot infrastructure availability, performance, and configuration-related problems and outages. Network traffic data can be displayed within NetIM to help IT understand how device outages/slowdowns are affecting broader network and application performance. It is often combined with NetProfiler and AppResponse as part of Riverbed’s Network Observability. NetIM provides visibility into your devices (physical, virtual or cloud) giving insight into the health and status of your network environment, translating to what your user is experiencing.

In the latest update to Riverbed NetIM 2.5, Wireless LAN metrics are available with predefined support for Cisco and HP-Aruba Wireless LAN Controllers, along with Wireless Access Point Views

The update also features new security-related capabilities to ensure that NetIM operates within the security parameters of customers’ IT environments, including TLS 1.3 support for all communication activities and the ability to add or update SSL certificates via the web UI.

Learn more about the benefits and new security features of Riverbed NetIM 2.5.

Although AppResponse users are generally responsible for the upkeep of the network infrastructure and its core connectivity and transport functions, they are not part of IT teams that make the decisions that determine which applications use network resources. It’s therefore quite common for AppResponse users to want to “discover” which applications and protocols are present in the network. Often, they are surprised by what they see!

Web applications constitute an increasing share of mission-critical apps. Some AppResponse customers choose not to use the Web Transaction Analysis (WTA) module for very detailed performance analysis of HTTP/S, but they still want the Application Stream Analysis (ASA) module to tell them which apps are present in the network. The ASA module primarily looks at fields in the IP and TCP/UDP headers. These fields do not have enough information to recognize internal web apps because that information is only present deep in the bowels of HTTP/S that ASA does not analyze. This creates the following problem: How do AppResponse customers using (only) ASA know which traffic on the network belongs to important internal web applications?

Discovering internal Web apps

Good news! A new feature, called Discovered Service Names, enables the ASA module to identify internal web apps by extracting the service name from the HTTP CONNECT, TLS SNI, or X509 Certificates. Public web apps, like SAP, Google, etc. that are already tracked by DPI aren’t discovered by this feature. The URL app is not automatically created; the user must choose to explicitly monitor an application. This feature is disabled by default.

How does it work?

By inspecting the SNI (Server Name Indication) field in SSL/TLS handshakes, AppResponse ASA can classify web traffic. SNI is an addition to the TLS encryption protocol that enables a client device to specify the domain name it is trying to reach in the first step of the TLS handshake, preventing common name mismatch errors. Using SNI, AppResponse ASA is now able to classify internal web applications traffic more accurately by inspecting the contents in SSL/TLS handshakes, in addition to fields in the IP and TCP/UDP headers.

AppResponse can also classify internal web traffic by matching the content of the HTTP Connect message that browsers send to web proxies, including CASBs that act as web proxies. HTTP Connect messages will typically contain the name of the web application or web service, e.g., hr.company.com, booking.company.com, etc. This lets ASA accurately classify traffic into internal web applications.

TLS 1.3 traffic decryption (PFS API)

Web applications dominate the mission-critical traffic that AppResponse sees in most of its in-production deployments. As a result, WTA is the second most used analysis module. It delivers vital insight into network and application behavior for web applications, e.g., seeing web traffic organized by user sessions, auto-stitched web pages and their network, client, and server delays, and analyzing web server behavior by looking for unexpected HTTP Status Codes and so on.

All mission-critical web apps use either TLS 1.2 or 1.3 encryption. AppResponse must decrypt these application packets to calculate and derive the statistics whose analysis (via Insights, Navigator, or Transaction Search) delivers the deep visibility AppResponse users expect. Because TLS 1.3 mandates the use of encryption algorithms that guarantee Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS), any man-in-the-middle network appliance that intercepts TLS 1.3 packets cannot decrypt them even if it has access to the private keys. As a result, we’ve added support for TLS 1.3 to our PFS API that enables the decryption of traffic encrypted by TLS 1.3, in addition to the previously supported SSL and TLS 1.2. We still need an external source (like a F5 load balancer) to send the keys. For more information on how AppResponse PFS API works, check out this blog Riverbed AppResponse Adds SSL/TLS Analysis and PFS API.

Backup and restore

An AppResponse deployed in production is a source of network and application performance data

– both packets and metadata/metrics derived from DPI. The metadata/metrics contain data that spans a few weeks, to several months, to a few years. A deployed AppResponse also contains a lot of user customizations in the form of configurations, e.g., Host Groups definitions, app definitions, traffic policy definitions, WTA page analysis rules, etc.

Performance data includes aggregate data (ASA, WTA, DBA, VOIP, CXA), alert events, scheduled reports, and system metrics. AppResponse customers want data loss protection in place for this information set. Together, an AppResponse’s configuration and forensic data represent very valuable information.

AppResponse can backup and restore both configuration and performance data to local and remote backup servers. You can initiate a backup manually or create a schedule and automate when backups are performed, e.g., after working hours or on weekends. However, you must restore to the same software and hardware.

Faster transaction analysis

What makes AppResponse transaction data invaluable is that it’s never topped. AppResponse power users use HD Insights and Transaction Search when they need to analyze all types of network and application behavior, including occasional low-volume communication. For example, a security use case like finding the IP address that generated just a few bytes of traffic six hours ago and went quiet after that.

We continue to make writing and querying faster when accessing critical transaction data (e.g., 1-min. summaries of each TCP connection, detailed summary metrics of each HTTP/S request-response pair, 1-min. summaries of each voice/video media stream, 1-min. summaries of every SQL query-response pair).

We addressed this problem in a two-part project: The first part was delivered in 11.12 and included updating to a newer version of the database we use for write-once many-reads data store for transaction data. This feature delivers the second part of this performance improvement by optimizing the structure of the underlying database tables to better leverage data sparseness and facilitate highly selective record processing times.

Support for VMWare ESXi 7.0

For customers who operate private clouds based on VMware ESXi, deploying a virtual AppResponse appliance as a guest VM is the NPM packet analysis option we have long delivered to address this need. Just like any other OS platform, the ESXi hypervisor evolves over time and shows up as newer release versions. In the release, we added support for VMware ESXi version 7.0. We continue to support versions 6.5 and 6.7 but dropped support for ESXi 6.0.

To summarize, Riverbed AppResponse provides the ability to extract valuable network and application performance information using real-time packet analysis and do it at the peak scale. We continue to enhance this capability by

• Improving AppResponse’s built-in intelligence to auto-recognize enterprise-internal web apps,
• Enabling decryption of TLS 1.3 using our PFS API,
• And delivering performance improvements for packet write to disk and HD Insight transaction queries.

Security benefits of Windows 11

Riverbed Network Performance Management (NPM) solutions can identify and alert on traffic coming from countries where your organization may not normally do business, e.g., North Korea. However, once this traffic is identified, the IT Operations or SecOps team must determine if that traffic is legitimate or suspicious.

CIDRs & Host Groups screen traffic

Here’s how a financial services company recently started to screen traffic coming from the Russian Federation. They use Riverbed AppResponse, packet-based application analysis, and Riverbed NetProfiler, full-fidelity flow monitoring.

The ITOps team, with the help of their Riverbed SE, started by putting together a list of the CIDR blocks for the Russian Federation, then separating them into 12 Host Groups. Host Groups allow you to manage similar objects together. These 12 Host Groups were added to both AppResponse and NetProfiler.

Next, the ITOps team set up monitoring at the port level. Immediately, they started to see traffic from the Russian Federation! Tweaking settings helped determine if the traffic is suspicious and required further investigation by SecOps. Here are some of the features they used:

1. Network Monitoring – receiving traffic information from any combination of sources. Aggregating, de-duplicating, and processing traffic data to prepare it for network behavior analytics. Behavior analytics builds profiles of typical network behavior for specified times so it can identify unusual changes that indicate performance or security issues.
2. Event Detection – analyzing compliance with service policies, performance and availability policies, security policies, and user-defined policies. Assigns each security policy violation event a severity rating number based on the likelihood of being a threat to network performance, availability, or security.
3. Alert Generation – checking the severity of each network event against a set of user-defined tolerance levels or alerting thresholds. When the severity of an event exceeds a tolerance or alerting threshold, NetProfiler alerts users to the existence of the event by indicating an alert condition and displaying information about the event.
4. Notification – automatically sending email, SMTP, or SMS alert messages to designated security or operations management personnel or systems.
5. Event Reporting – saving details of all events that triggered alerts. Event detail reports can be viewed on the NetProfiler user interface or retrieved by remote management systems for analysis.

Setting User-Defined Policies

The next step for this company is to leverage user-defined policies. User-Defined Policies is customizable event detection that lets you configure your own alerts based on hosts, ports, interfaces, and response time.

This financial services company is planning to create policies to alert when traffic from any of the 12 Host Groups hits any sensitive servers or on ports associated with mission-critical applications. User-defined policies will simplify the identification of suspect traffic since only internal employees should be accessing these servers.

If you are interested in leveraging these capabilities, check out this video that explains how to create a user-defined policy to proactively monitor high-risk subnets.

If you’d like the Russian Federation CIDR blocks with instructions on how to import them as Host Groups in AppResponse and NetProfiler, see this Knowledge Base article on Riverbed Support.

1  verizon.com/dbir/

2  https://www.govtech.com/security/hacking-top-ten.html

Today’s dynamic, hybrid workplace is facing a very similar problem. Enterprise organizations rely on video content — live, recorded, and collaborative — to operate efficiently and effectively. Even the most mission-critical activities now rely on video conferencing and reliable, high-quality video content.

The problem, however, is how much bandwidth video consumes at the local branch office or at someone’s home. This is especially in locations where many end-users consume the same content, a network connection can be overwhelmed, and the quality of the video stream will suffer. This is where eCDNs (enterprise content delivery networks) shine.

The Riverbed eCDN Accelerator

Riverbed eCDN Accelerator solution solves this problem by mimicking the distribution of content throughout a local region. Instead of placing a rack of content servers in data centers every 100 square miles, Riverbed eCDN Accelerator makes use of the WebRTC peer-to-peer technology to deliver a single stream to a dedicated computer in one location, which then distributes the content to its local peers.

With this method in place, WAN (wide area network) traffic for video content is dramatically reduced up to 99% while speeding video delivery up to 70%. This means video distribution can scale without needing additional service provider connections or locally installed hardware.

End-users working in the same office will immediately benefit from the eCDN peering relationship, and so will end-users working remotely over a VPN connection or when video traffic is being backhauled. In fact, it doesn’t matter where the source of the video content originates. The solution works just as well with video content delivered from the cloud or a SaaS provider.

In the graphic below, notice the difference in the volume of streams between a network using Riverbed’s eCDN Accelerator and one that isn’t.

A cloud-based solution

The eCDN solution is cloud-based with computers peering with each other via a browser or a software agent, not a piece of hardware. This provides several benefits to both IT operations and to the end-user.

First, computers peer with each other via a browser for certain applications, making zero-touch deployment quick and easy. Some applications benefit from an agent that can also be deployed via a browser eliminating the need for manual installations or some sort of local hardware.

The policy is pushed from the cloud providing IT centralized control over the environment. From there, IT can manage the ports that are used, manage the cache size on each local computer, filter the bitrate for video streams and configure location-based eCDN parameters to accommodate security requirements.

Second, for the end-user, there’s nothing to do but enjoy high-quality video. Deployment and ongoing operation happen behind the scenes, so for an end-user consuming recorded or live video content, it’s completely hands-off with instant results.

Video Consumption is on the Rise

Streaming for live video on Microsoft Teams, live virtual events hosted on platforms like ON24, and recorded video-on-demand has ballooned in the last few years. In fact, 82% of all IP traffic is expected to be related to internet-related video by the end of this year.

Without a solid enterprise content delivery solution in place, this increase will overwhelm many internet connections and crush the video quality needed to conduct business in today’s world while also impacting other applications running across the same networks.

Riverbed’s eCDN Accelerator is a powerful solution that improves the digital experience for end-users and ensures optimal video delivery.

For more information, reach out to your Riverbed representative and visit riverbed.com to learn more.

Incomplete, oversubscribed flow collection can lead to an unreliable and misleading understanding of the following types of problems:

• Bandwidth problems
• Top Talkers on a specific interface
• Unauthorized application usage
• WAN utilization issues
• Incorrect QoS tagging
• Wireless bandwidth usage
• Analyzing zero-day threats
• Identify a DNS attack
• Identify data exfiltration
• Computer worm virus

Therefore, it is essential to check on your flow rates on a regular basis to ensure you still have the correct number of flows for your current environment.

How to know if  NetProfiler is oversubscribed

You can determine your flow status by going to the NetProfiler or Flow Gateway ADMINISTRATION link at the top of the screen, and then clicking on SYSTEM. As shown in Figure 1, the Flow Capacity Usage and Raw Flows Processed/Over Limit will show you how many flows you are processing.

These graphs can show up to about 1 million flows over your limit. Under 1 million flows, the graphs will show exactly how much over; after they can’t calculate how much over and just drop the flows.

NetProfiler requires all flows in order to provide complete, comprehensive, and accurate monitoring and reporting. Once you exceed your flow limit, NetProfiler will not be able to capture all of the relevant data. This will result in incomplete monitoring, and likely inaccurate insights and false results. Without this full-flow data, the risks and impacts are consistent with the risks associated with not having NetProfiler capabilities at all. For these reasons, it’s important to maintain appropriate flow licenses.

I’ve reached the max 20M Flows of my legacy NetProfiler,  now what?

Riverbed offers a trade-up program to assist you in moving from legacy and xx70 versions of NetProfiler to the latest xx80 versions. Both the virtual and appliance versions of NetProfiler xx80 currently max out at 30 million flows per minute, a 33% increase over legacy solutions. Plus, the xx80 Riverbed Flow Gateway is also increased in performance and scale, with up to 6 million FPM.

What are the compelling reasons to renew?

If you are on a NetProfiler that is EOS, you’ve missed out on a lot of performance and scale updates including:

• An upper limit of 30M FPM for NetProfiler
• 6M FPM limit for Flow Gateway and a high availability configuration
• 2000 preferred interfaces
• Seamless grow path from 10K to 30M FPM by simply adding licenses and Expansion modules
• 10GB NIC for Flow Gateway and Dispatcher

Some of the features you may have missed: AWS and Azure deployment, AD Connector 3.0, IPv6 support, restricted reporting, integrations with NetIM and Aternity, SAML, Flow Gateway buffering.

Other great features include enhanced cloud flow support, a really cool modern home screen, and new Google-like search.

Benefits of a properly working NetProfiler

Network Performance Management (NPM) can help you keep your network and applications running at peak performance. Here are a few ways Riverbed NetProfiler, as part of the Riverbed Unified Network Performance Management platform, can help:

1. Proactively prevent slowdowns and outages to minimize downtime and the effect it can have on your users and your business outcomes.
2. Resolve performance issues faster because you have all the insights you need at your fingertips.
3. Eliminate network blind spots by providing visibility into on-premises, virtual, and cloud environment in the same unified dashboards.
4. Improve user experience. Networks are designed to deliver applications to users. User experience should always be measure and monitored to ensure ample performance.
5. Enhance network security. Network visibility delivers the crucial insights to detect, investigate and mitigate advanced threats that bypass typical preventative measures.
6. Increase IT collaboration. Disparate IT teams can share common network data to solve performance issues faster and without the finger-pointing.

Ask your Riverbed partner or account team for more information on xx80 trade-ups or how to order more flows. Click here to learn more about Riverbed NetProfiler.

The Slack outage was less widescale, affecting only a proportion of corporate users for up to 24 hours, but it was also as the result of an erroneous maintenance command. In both incidents, time to recovery was extended, as DNS servers had to be rapidly reconfigured and BGP replicated across the internet, and multiple data centres powered up again. In Facebook’s case, this put an extensive strain on power systems.

Mistakes like these do and will always happen–so what’s the best way to mitigate them and minimize outages when they occur? You have two choices: passive or proactive.

1. Wait for customers to complain (or leave)

The Facebook outage caught front-page news because it affected so many individuals and businesses. For many smaller organisations, Facebook and Instagram are their primary digital connection with their customers, often because they’re cheaper and easier to maintain than a standard website, even if they have one. One example is the number of retailers and restaurants offering click-and-collect or delivery during lockdown via their Instagram accounts. Influencers–one of today’s growth businesses –would also have lost revenues.

In some countries, WhatsApp has become the de facto call and SMS service provider—even for government departments. Inability to access it (and its stored contact details) would have put many millions of people out of touch.

Further, Facebook is used for authentication for accessing other online services, making it the ‘digital front end’ for millions of other businesses. It is also the greatest connector of family and friends for the western world. While a single outage is unlikely to lose the behemoth a large swag of disciples, few digital platforms as resilient, especially where there are alternatives.

Overall, Facebook’s outage is variously estimated to have cost the company US$60-100 million in ad revenue and wiped US$40 billion off its market capitalisation. Other estimates reckon the outage could have cost the wider economy hundreds of millions each hour.

You are unlikely to have quite as many customers dependent on your digital services as Facebook, but such a catastrophic failure could cost your business considerable revenues. And worse, you could lose customers for good. Banking customers, for example, often operate accounts with multiple providers. If your service goes down, it could be the last straw that will see them walk.

2. Be proactive through early warning and diagnosis

Whether an outage is due to erroneous commands, as in these cases, or due to hacking, you need the tools to pinpoint the precise issues so you can fix them fast. As Facebook’s engineers reported, “All of this happened very fast. And as our engineers worked to figure out what was happening and why, they faced two large obstacles: first, it was not possible to access our data centers through our normal means because their networks were down, and second, the total loss of DNS broke many of the internal tools we’d normally use to investigate and resolve outages like this.”

Border gateway protocol (BGP), for example, can go down in just 90 seconds–or potentially sub-second, depending on how it’s deployed. Using Riverbed’s Unified Network Performance Monitoring platform of integrated online services, you can set synthetics at the packet level to post alarms if any changes occur. NetIM can monitor BGP passively, while AppResponse can look at packets to detect failure. This enables you to be on the front foot–before people complain.

In the 11.12 release of AppResponse, we’ve introduced DNS Reporting and Alerting. AppResponse 11.12 includes brand new DNS analysis which previously required inspection using tools like SteelCentral Packet Analyzer or Wireshark. These new insights allow us to identify problems with DNS performance as well as compliance. This means that we can identify quickly, and accurately which clients are making what queries to which DNS servers, and if they are responded to.

The AppResponse DNS policies also allow us to identify when we see changes in our DNS traffic profiles. For example, we can alert on clients making connections to foreign DNS servers as an indicator of compromise. Another example could be increased DNS timeouts or errors.

These new features are included in AppResponse 11.12 and included if you are running the ASA feature license.

Stronger security makes it harder

As Facebook found, the strong security measures they have in place slowed their ability to bounce back up: “We’ve done extensive work hardening our systems to prevent unauthorized access, and it was interesting to see how that hardening slowed us down as we tried to recover from an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making.”

As I wrote in my recent blog, Customer Experience Lessons from the Akamai Outage, major outages highlight the importance of redundancy for essential services like global load balancing. Moreover, they emphasise the need for end-to-end visibility to pinpoint any network, application or third-party service fault within minutes rather than hours. In today’s economy, digital customer experience and business continuity are what it’s all about.

Compared to a more directed malware campaign, this vulnerability has many potential exploits. However, Microsoft is maintaining a list of IPs believed to be taking advantage of this vulnerability as detected in their Azure service. Keep in mind, though, that because these bad actors are also scanning systems that are not vulnerable, we should be careful to examine positive indicators closely. The scanners are looking for vulnerable systems, and so receiving an incoming communication from them is not as conclusive as an outgoing communication would be.

Because this vulnerability can affect so many systems, it’s very important to examine network history immediately. We can use Riverbed NetProfiler to identify flows and hosts affected by this threat both now and in the past, and Riverbed AppResponse to analyze web application traffic to identify the vulnerability in action.

Log4J Threat Hunting with NetProfiler

Using NetProfiler with the Advanced Security Module, we can go back in time to verify exposure to the Log4J vulnerability. NetProfiler uses a frequently updated threat feed as its source for vulnerability information including the specific criteria to run against newly captured and stored flow data.

In the graphic below, notice that we can select Log4Shell Known Exploits from the threat feed and run a report to see if we are impacted when it first appeared on the network, and which hosts are affected.

Notice in the graphic below that we’re running a report for the last week.

Some experts believe this vulnerability first appeared around December 1, so we can extend our search further back in time. In the graphic below we’re searching back to December 1.

Log4J Threat Hunting with AppResponse

The Web Transaction Analyzer module, or WTA, within AppResponse 11 allows us to search for the Log4J vulnerability from an application perspective using byte patterns to search the HTTP header and payload.

In the graphic below, notice that within WTA we can use some custom variables to search within the body, URL, and header of application traffic and report back if any of the conditions are true. Here we’re looking specifically for the JNDI lookup since it’s a key part of the exploit mechanism used by the vulnerability. These conditions could be extended to exclude certain source IPs that are legitimately running vulnerability scans as part of your security posture.

Mitigation Steps

 After a thorough scan using NetProfiler and AppResponse, also consider these steps to protect systems from the Log4J vulnerability.

• Enable application layer firewalls such as AWS WAF which would significantly reduce the risk by protecting cloud-based and some SaaS applications
• Block outbound LDAP to the public internet
• For log4j versions greater or equal to 2.10 set log4j2.formatMsgNoLookups to true
• And of course, always remember to install the latest patches in both internet-facing and internal systems.

The old tech adage “you can’t secure what you can’t see” has never been more poignant than now. Visibility is the cornerstone of network security, and by using powerful visibility tools such as Riverbed NetProfiler and AppResponse, we can gain a deep and wide awareness of everything going on in our network both in real-time and historically.

₁https://www.cisa.gov/news/2021/12/11/statement-cisa-director-easterly-log4j-vulnerability

While most organizations are not fully prepared to deliver a seamless hybrid experience, nearly all have adopted some remote communication and collaboration tools. Despite this, a surprising 31% still need collaboration and virtual relationship building.

Zoom is the leading communications app with 300 million daily meeting participants, both paid and free,¹ while Microsoft Teams hit 250 million monthly active users in July 2021.²

The one problem with these and other collaboration solutions is that they are bandwidth-intensive and often suffer from performance issues, especially when users are working from low-bandwidth home networks.

Zoom and Teams

To solve this problem, Riverbed AppResponse added full visibility into all Zoom and Teams media, voice and video. The AppResponse Unified Communications Analysis (UCA) module can now auto-detect Zoom and Microsoft Teams media streams. Customers can now better support Zoom and Teams audio and video traffic and surface the full complement of quality metrics, such as MOS-CQ, MOS-V, Jitter, packet loss, new channel rate, and more. These details will help IT diagnose call and video quality issues.

DNS

The Domain Name System (DNS) is like a phonebook for the Internet. It translates a web domain name into an IP address and vice versa. People access websites through domain names, like Riverbed.com or Aternity.com then the web browser interacts through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. In short, DNS translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources.

AppResponse 11.12 added three new DNS Insights to the Application Stream Analysis (ASA) Module to help troubleshoot the DNS performance and security issues, such as:

• DNS service outages, i.e., “Can’t find server”
• High DNS latency or high load times
• DoS or DDoS attacks that can bring down the service

The new DNS Insights include:

• DNS Servers—analyzes all DNS servers. The types of metrics on this chart include All DNS Traffic with DNS Timeouts and All Errors, Slowest DNS Servers, DNS Servers with Errors, DNS Servers with Timeouts.
• DNS Server—shows results for an individual server. The metrics in the chart include DNS Requests & Responses, Response Time TruePlot, DNS Timeouts, DNS Errors, and a new graph called Top Queried Domains.
• DNS Transactions—helps you understand the performance of individual DNS transactions. The types of metrics you can utilize include DNS Errors, DNS Response Time, Slowest DNS Transactions, DNS Timeouts, Query Names, Client Groups, Client IPs, Server IPs, Opscodes, Query Types, and a GeoMap.

TCP Metrics

TCP is the heartbeat of the network. In fact, it’s the protocol used by nearly all modern applications and the AppResponse ASA module functions like an MRI for TCP, providing rich details into TCP-based apps. In fact, ASA calculates more than 60 health and activity metrics for TCP.

This release is taking our TCP analysis to the next level by adding TCP Receive Window, TCP Zero Window, and TCP Out-of-Order to the ASA module. These new TCP metrics enable NetOps users to diagnose these serious problems without having to dive into the packets using Riverbed Packet Analyzer Plus or Wireshark.

• TCP Receive Window—is the amount of free space in the client’s receive buffer. This field tells the sender how much data can be sent before an acknowledgment is received. If the receiver is not able to process the data as fast as it arrives, gradually the receive buffer will fill and the TCP window will shrink. This will alert the sender that it needs to reduce the amount of data sent to allow the receiver time to clear the buffer.
• TCP Zero Windows—happens when the client says, “I don’t have any available buffer space, stop sending data.” This tells the TCP sender to stop sending data. Typically, this indicates that the network is delivering traffic faster than the receiver can process it. When the client begins to digest the data, it will let the server know to resume sending.
• TCP out-of-order—occurs when a packet has a sequence number lower than the previously received packet. If too many packets are received out of order, TCP may cause retransmission of packets, like dropped packets. As such, the impact of out-of-order packets is can be similar to packet loss.

Other New Features

Other features released in AppResponse 11.12 include:

• The ability to search TLS Handshake and DNS Transactions, in addition to previously supported Web and Database queries
• The ability to import/export custom Insights
• Business Hour profiles for Insights & Navigator; in addition to previously supported Scheduled Reports and Policies
• Remote out-of-band system access and management for AppResponse xx80 appliances
• RFC 5425 encrypted Syslog notifications
• Performance improvements for HD (High-Def) queries

If it wasn’t clear, the theme for this AppResponse release was application and network intelligence—the ability to extract useful network and application performance information via real-time packet analysis. It’s our hope these new features make your life easier and your network safer and higher performing.

Riverbed AppResponse customers with support contracts can download AppResponse version 11.12 for free from the Riverbed Support Site. Otherwise, click here for more information.

¹ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/zoom-statistics/

² https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-teams-hits-250-million-monthly-active-user-milestone/

We get it, hybrid work is important and here to stay. But shifting to a high-performing hybrid work model is challenging and elusive for most with only 32% believing they are completely prepared to support the shift to hybrid work. What do we do? Address both human- and technology-related barriers NOW!

As the survey noted, 80% of business decision-makers believe technology disruptions negatively affect them, their teams, and employee job satisfaction. To gain the maximum benefits from hybrid work, organizations must invest in technologies and modernize their IT environment. Under-investing in technologies that ensure IT services are performing and secure can have severe consequences to business success and the employee experience.

Now the good news. More than 90% of respondents agree hybrid work helps with recruiting talent and competitiveness and 84% agree hybrid work will have a lasting and positive impact on society and the world. So, they are investing in critical capabilities such as end-to-end visibility, cybersecurity and acceleration technologies to enable long-term success. This is important, as the need for end-to-end visibility and actionable insights intensifies in a hybrid workplace. And when networks, digital services and SaaS applications operate at peak performance, so do employees and the business.

Are you ready? Take a look at the full Riverbed | Aternity Hybrid Work Global Survey 2021 and discover key executive insights and investment areas to create a high-performing hybrid workplace.

For the success of your business, happiness of your employees and satisfaction of your customers, do it today, before it is too late.

• First, how can we have visibility into a network we don’t manage?
• Second, how can we ensure peak application performance over a network we don’t own?

Riverbed’s visibility and performance solutions address these modern problems head-on to provide end-to-end visibility from the client to the cloud as well as optimal application performance no matter where people connect to do their work.

The two sides of a conversation are no longer static. In the past, end-users were grouped together at an office managed by the IT department, and applications were down the hall in a server room or in a data center owned by the organization. That’s not at all the case anymore. Now, end-users could be virtually anywhere there’s an internet connection, and they’re accessing applications that live in the cloud.

We’ll be addressing these two problems during three short demonstrations prepared for Microsoft Ignite 2021. Read on for details on what we’ll be covering in each of the demos below:

Aternity provides remote worker visibility

In the first scenario, we’ll see how Aternity gives us historical visibility of our remote client computers when they’re working remotely over a VPN. Aternity’s VPN usage and trends dashboards provide very specific information on how end-users are connecting, over which VPNs, and how connections perform.

Application Acceleration ensures peak performance of on-premise applications

In our second scenario, we’ll see Riverbed Application Acceleration in action as it dramatically improves the performance of an on-premises application. Because it’s an agent-based solution, we can provide the benefits of application acceleration regardless of where end-users are located.

SaaS Accelerator optimizes SaaS performance for remote workers

In our last scenario, we’ll see a real-time demonstration of how Riverbed SaaS Accelerator optimizes Microsoft Azure and Sharepoint traffic, again regardless of where end-users work. In this case, our end-users are remote, and they’re accessing applications in the cloud, delivered by our Microsoft SaaS provider. Riverbed SaaS Accelerator was designed for this very scenario – ensuring top performance of SaaS applications for end-users at the office or working remotely.

For today’s hybrid workforce, a simple internet connection just isn’t enough anymore. We don’t manage the network many of our end users are connecting to, but we still need the visibility and application performance we had when everyone worked at the office. As the workplace continues to be in a state of flux, our visibility and performance solutions help to keep your end users and applications productive from anywhere.

Check out Riverbed’s virtual booth at Microsoft Ignite 2021 where you can watch our demos videos and learn more about our solutions.  To register, visit the Microsoft Ignite Registration page here.

As we look forward, the New Horizon is upon us—it’s digital-first and hybrid by design, with cloud, SaaS and legacy technologies working together and employees collaborating and engaging with customers anywhere, anytime on any device.

To achieve the needs of today’s enterprise, businesses and customers are demanding IT organizations take the following steps to successfully move forward:

• Embrace a hybrid culture
• Modernize IT
• Leverage end-to-end visibility to improve security postures

Embrace a hybrid culture

Embrace a hybrid culture: hybrid networks, hybrid workplace and hybrid workstyles. There is an acceleration of network and application usage by users internal and external to every organization. IT must deliver seamless virtual and physical experiences that are consistent, reliable and secure for all employees and customers, regardless of when and where they work or how they choose to connect.

Modernize IT

Digital acceleration requires IT modernization and the use of public and private cloud infrastructure. The challenge is how to combine legacy environments with new cloud infrastructure and validate the efficacy of this digital transformation. With the goal of creating modern, hybrid cloud environments, you must overcome the complexity of operating resources on-premises, in the cloud and at the edge. This requires investing in technologies that give you end-to-end visibility and control—empowering your teams to deliver rock-solid, secure performance and digital experience.

Leverage end-to-end visibility to secure performance and digital experience

There have never been greater challenges for IT than the current complexity of the network and the aggressiveness of cyberattacks. IT teams must gain full visibility and control over the security and performance of their modern, hybrid environment. To accomplish this organizations must capture full-fidelity data—not sample—across networks, apps and end-users, which is what our visibility solutions enable.

End-to-end visibility and the rich, broad set of data it provides is more important than ever in our modern hybrid enterprises to ensure productivity, end-user experience, high-quality digital experiences and security, but the treasure trove of data is more valuable when analyzed in context to deliver actionable insights to the multitude of stakeholders that are driving the organizational goals—transforming IT operators into technology leaders who connect insights into business outcomes

Our vision is to deliver actionable insights that extend from the technology infrastructure through the network all the way to the customer to protect and extract the value behind every click.

To help you maximize this transition, we’re hyper-focused on bringing unique value in two critical areas: Network Performance and Acceleration, and End-to-End Visibility.

Network performance and acceleration

Riverbed | Aternity application acceleration and WAN optimization technologies overcome the effects of latency, bandwidth saturation and network contention to ensure the fastest, most reliable delivery of any application—including popular SaaS applications—to any user, regardless of location or network type. Delivering performance is vital in a hybrid environment. Today there is a race to the edge. The agility and efficiencies gained by investments in cloud and SaaS won’t matter if your mobile and remote workforce productivity suffers as a result of unacceptable application performance. Networks must optimize to the edge and accelerate applications; on-prem to the edge, cloud to the edge and application to the edge while securing edge access.

End-to-end visibility

Today, there is an abundance of data being generated. Many organizations are burdened with mountains of siloed data from disparate monitoring tools that are difficult to normalize and interpret for immediate action. More digital devices and sensors, plus broader, more complex networks means more data sources. Decision-makers are being inundated by data and alerts, still lacking business intelligence and actionable insights, which is even more important with hybrid networks, cloud and dispersed workforces. However, pulling all that siloed data, from the user, the application and the network up into the cloud allows you to contextualize the data and provide actional insights.

We recently made a strategic decision to bring more closely together the best-in-breed assets of Riverbed and Aternity (previously a division of Riverbed) to bring to our customers the most comprehensive end-to-end visibility solution in the industry. This is powerful and brings together full-fidelity visibility that will enable us to deliver unified observability of your entire digital ecosystem: application, network, servers, cloud, devices.

If you are an organization that is seeking to Optimize Performance—Maximize Productivity—Reduce Risk—Eliminate Waste—Improve Customer Experience—you need actionable insights that extend from the technology infrastructure through the network all the way to the customer to protect the value behind every click. Technology organizations, especially IT, become invaluable when they can gather information that can be easily understood and used to make faster, better, more accurate decisions—fueling innovation, which drives the business and organizational performance. IT can be an accelerator and not an inhibitor to your organization’s productivity.

Unified observability provides a single source of truth of your data providing actionable insights that transform IT operators into technology leaders who can drive value for the business by delivering:

• Frictionless Performance
• Unyielding Productivity and Efficiency
• Seamless business continuity

We are here to help our customers and the market prepare for this new horizon that is hybrid and all about digital experience and performance. Join us this week at the Riverbed Global User Conference to learn more about our strategy, vision and how you can master the New Horizon.

Rather than present 100 PowerPoint slides, we walked through troubleshooting an actual application performance problem. We still had a slide here and there to introduce the tool we’d use in that segment, but other than that we wanted our presentation to be as much demo as possible.

We built an environment of real client computers running over a real SD-WAN to real web servers in three AWS regions. We connected everything to our SQL backend, and we stood up internal and external computers running internal and public DNS. And to set the stage for our presentation, we purposefully caused poor application performance of our demo web application.

Level 1 helpdesk

I started with Portal, similar to how a level 1 helpdesk person would. We immediately saw a problem with our AWS East region and no indications that there was a problem with our SD-WAN. So, just like in an actual troubleshooting workflow, I escalated the ticket to the next engineer.

Visibility from the client perspective

Jon Hodgson, VP of Product Marketing at Aternity, analyzed the client-side with Aternity. Aternity uses agents installed locally on endpoints, whether those be workstations, mobile devices, servers, or even containers. Jon used the Aternity dashboard and DXI, or the Digital Experience Index, to confirm poor application performance on all computers, but he also discovered an unauthorized crypto miner on three machines.

Investigating a security breach

This was a security breach, so it was time to escalate to John Murphy, Technical Director at Riverbed, who played the role of a security engineer. John used NetProfiler to dig into the crypto miner application flows to determine where they were going, when they started, and what else on our network was infected. We believe that visibility is the foundation for robust network security, so to us it’s only natural to incorporate automated security investigation functions into our flow analyzer.

Though John got some great info in terms of the breach, he didn’t find the root cause of our application performance problem. So he escalated the ticket to the network team to see if there was a problem with the network itself.

Escalating to the network team

Brandon Carroll, Director of Technical Evangelists, used NetIM to look at the path in between clients and AWS. SD-WAN gateways looked healthy, core switches looked fine, and all our regions showed green in the dashboard. It was time to get more granular, so Brandon introduced Riverbed’s synthetic testing tool, built right into NetIM.

Several tests were already running – in this case, HTTP tests which monitored successes, failures, and response times to our web servers. The metrics didn’t look good. Response times were high, and success rates were around 80%. And using some synthetic monitoring tests he created on the fly, he began to see strange DNS issues.

With this red flag, Brandon escalated the ticket to our last engineer, Vince Berk, CTO at Riverbed. Vince used AppResponse to analyze the specific TCP connections between our clients, DNS servers, and web servers.

Digging deep to find the root cause

AppResponse is a powerful analytics tool. It gives us the macro view of how applications are doing using visualizations of server response time, retransmission delay, connection failure and setup time, and an entire host of metrics that can be looked at individually or taken together as the application’s User Response Time. And since AppResponse gathers every single packet we throw at it, it’s also a full-fidelity visibility tool down to the most granular micro level.

And that’s exactly how Vince used AppResponse. He analyzed TCP flows, looked at individual packets, and ultimately found that DNS wasn’t load-balancing but was instead pointing all requests to the AWS East region. All this unexpected traffic overwhelmed our AWS East web server which negatively affected the performance of our application.

Remember that Portal is our macro view and usually our first step in troubleshooting, so the helpdesk may have figured out the root cause right away.

You can visit our NFD26 presentation, to see each of our visibility tools used independently to analyze different pieces of the puzzle.

Riverbed’s end-to-end visibility solution operates at the macro level to provide high-level metrics of application performance, but when it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get into the weeds, our tools provide the depth and breadth of end-to-end visibility at the micro level from the client, through the network, and to the cloud.

Visit Tech Field Day’s event page to watch our entire presentation at Networking Field Day 26, and visit the Riverbed Community to join in on the discussion!

Tangential to the topic of alerting, NetIM added a new Synthetic Test Object View Page and an IP SLA Views Page. The new Synthetic Test Object View page has four tabs that show results, alerts, browse configurations, and metrics. And, the IP SLA Views page allows you to view, navigate and search through all the IP SLA test results you’ve collected via polling.

This is a big and exciting release, so let’s dig into details and explore the ins and outs.

Re-imagined alerts page

The NetIM alerts page and alerts banner has been reimagined from the backend and the frontend. What we are providing now is a view and count of what is in active threshold violation. This is the “right now” view. It’s not time-based. We also provide aggregation of the counts, views into the counts, and the ability to filter the active alerts and the counts. Note that the Time-base Legacy Alerts page is still available.

The alerts page is organized into three sections. The top section is the alert banner that aggregates alerts in three ways:

• Alert Counts by Severity
• Affected Objects currently in Alert
• Count of Alert Profiles that are triggering active threshold violations

We have multiple tabs that you can use to slice and dice and view the alerts that are in an active state, for example, Alert Counts by Object Type, Metric Class and Metric Name. You can also aggregate and view Affected Objects in Alert and Affected Geographic Region/Country. Another view NetIM provides is Alert Count by Alert Profile. This provides you with information on which of your defined alerts are causing the devices or objects to be in alert at that time.

There are lots of features in the Active Alerts view. The Active Alert Table has filtering. You can launch a Quick View of the metric. You can search and perform grouping within the table. You can customize the columns per user, and you can download the entire table to CSV.

NetIM also gives you two historical alert views so you can see when things went into alert first and when you had the most things in alert.

Alert suppression

Alerts can be suppressed to avoid generating too many alert entries or too many non-actionable alerts when the triggering condition occurs often. In this case, the site-based gateway alert suppression allows you to suppress all related devices and interfaces if the gateway is down. That way you only receive the one gateway alert. Once the site gateway is fixed, it should fix most, if not all the device and interface alerts. And, you don’t have all these extraneous alerts hiding the true issue.

To put it another way: if all configured site gateways are down, then all notifications for all devices & interfaces configured for that site are suppressed. If at least one gateway device is up for a site, then all configured notifications are sent.

You can configure Site Gateway suppression by going to Settings/Organize. There is also the Notification setting you must configure.

IP SLA Views page

NetIM still supports Cisco and Juniper IP SLA tests and the polling is configured at the device level. What’s changed is the IP SLA Views page and IP SLA tabs for source and destination devices of the test as well as the associated site and group. This Views page is launched from the menu item ‘More’ and allows you to view and navigate through all the IP SLA tests you have in your managed network. It supports search, filtering, or a Metric Quick View and a drill down to the source and target device and the site. Additionally, in the section below the table, you can view Top-N tests by various metrics.

You can now view the IP SLA tests scoped to device, site or group. Finally, we provided an IP SLA page. This is a page dedicated to each IP SLA test. It provides the test configuration and the test metrics.

Synthetic Test Object View page

The Synthetic Test Object View page has four tabs that show at-a-glance results, browse configurations, associated alarms, and metrics. In addition, the Synthetic Test TCP Port and other configuration properties are now available within Portal.

Reporting enhancements

NetIM now supports business hours, multiple discontinuous time periods, for example, Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m to 5:00 p.m. In Performance Summary Reports, you select either All Hours, Business Hours, or Non-Business Hours to filter the timeframe of any report.

The Performance Summary Report now includes Component Type support. This has been expanded from the core base objects to components in the form. You select the Component Type from the drop-down list, then you select the relevant Metrics Class type for that Component Type, and finally the relevant Metrics.

AWS C2S

NetIM supports AWS C2S, extremely secure cloud computing for the U.S. Intelligence Community. The AWS Secret Region can operate workloads up to the Secret U.S. security classification level. Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority. AWS customers benefit from data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations.

Out-of-the-box metrics

This release added new out-of-the-box metrics, including a slew of Wireless LAN Controller metrics, F5 Load Balancer System Throughput, Group Status, and, of course, Site Gateways Status.

To summarize, NetIM 2.4 is a vital release that totally revamps how NetIM manages alerting. It also takes a major step forward in managing and reporting on synthetic and IP SLA tests, among an array of other updates.

Existing Riverbed NetIM customers with support contracts can download version 2.4 from the Riverbed Support Site. Customers running NetIM 1.x and NetCollector customers can easily upgrade to NetIM. Just ask your account manager for details.

Riverbed NetProfiler recently introduced new features that enrich information sharing and simplifies its UI with a new homescreen and free-form search. It also improved security and enhanced cloud visibility, supporting native Azure NSG Flow Logs and augmenting support for AWS VPC Flows Logs (learn more about these updates here).  

NetProfiler’s theme is to make it easier to use by new users, helpdesk, support tier 1 and 2 users, and even users of other Riverbed NPM solutions. By simplifying and modernizing the user interface and menu and making the look and feel more consistent with the rest of the Riverbed NPM product line, we want more users to be able use it more of the time. 

New Home Screen