Riverbed Technology, a leading IT performance company, has launched a comprehensive, best-of-breed secure Web gateway and WAN optimisation solution for organisations with remote offices.

The joint solution combines Riverbed award-winning WAN optimisation technology with Microsoft’s Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) 2010 solution into a single appliance. This offering enables customers to virtualise their branch office infrastructure and deliver LAN-like application performance for branch users while protecting corporate networks from Web security threats such as malware and spam.

With this offering, Riverbed and Microsoft customers have the ability to further virtualise IT resources at the branch in a cost-effective manner while delivering end-to-end security. The solution takes advantage of the capabilities of the Riverbed Services Platform (RSP), a virtualised platform capable of running branch services, integrated with the Steelhead appliance hardware.

RSP allows customers to deploy up to five best-of-breed branch services on a single device, enabling organisations to consolidate the hardware infrastructure at the branch office, resulting in easier IT management and lower operational overhead and power costs.

In addition to the TMG security platform, Riverbed customers have the ability to virtualise and run other Microsoft services on the RSP, including Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2003, Active Directory and DNS/DHCP.

“This joint solution enables organisations to realise what we call Business Ready Security through Riverbed best-of-breed WAN optimisation solutions fully integrated with our comprehensive Web security solution in a way that is simple to manage and deploy,” stated Zakie Mashiah, principal group manager in the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.

“By partnering with companies like Microsoft, Riverbed is the only vendor to offer a single appliance that combines WAN optimisation with a complete end-to-end security offering,” added Venugopal Pai, vice president, global alliances at Riverbed.-TradeArabia News Service