Sponsor: Riverbed

This eBook on hybrid enterprise and performance management talks about the three key challenges of performance management in today's hybrid enterprise: 1) lack of visibility 2) poor performance 3) limited control. It also suggests ways to regain control of the hybrid enterprise.

In an era of business that demands unrivaled agility, most organizations are stuck on networks that are still hardware-bound, router-heavy, and hard-coded. Fortunately, the software-defined movement is ushering in a whole new way to manage enterprise WANs. Read this white paper from CIO.com and Riverbed to explore the business drivers behind SD-WAN. See what benefits SD-WAN can deliver your organization, and gain some insights into overcoming the potential obstacles of adopting an SD-WAN to unlock its full potential.

Digital transformation on the 3rd Platform continues to present unprecedented opportunities and challenges for enterprise networks and the IT professionals who operate them. Indeed, the requirements associated with cloud computing have already reverberated through datacenter networking, with software-defined networking (SDN) arising as an architectural approach that provided the network with the agility and responsiveness that it lacked previously but has come to require. Now, the focus is turning to how the WAN must change to accommodate the requirements of cloud applications and services. Fortunately, technologies such as hybrid WAN and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) are coming to the rescue, giving enterprise IT the means to allow the WAN to meet these challenges directly.

IT leaders are adopting hybrid WAN topologies to increase capacity and reliability while balancing cost and performance requirements. However, these hybrid architectures are often too complex, rigid, and fragile. As a result, many organizations are challenging the status quo of traditional networking. Read this Technology Adoption Profile from Forrester to learn why 90% of network managers are looking to evolve their WAN, and see why new approaches such as SD-WAN are required to compete in today's digital age.

This field guide examines common, yet elusive application performance problems that reveal themselves only when you look at them from the right vantage point, and with tools that can capture all of the data, not just some of it.

This guide is based on the real-world experiences of Jon Hodgson, a Riverbed APM subject-matter expert who has helped hundreds of organizations worldwide optimize their mission-critical applications.

Performance issues today are compounded by increasingly complex infrastructures that IT teams must contend with when delivering applications. As a result detecting and fixing performance problems is hard. Sluggish end-user transactions may present themselves as being slow due to the code. However, that slowness is often not the root cause, but rather a symptom of an underlying infrastructural issue hidden from view. Examine common, yet elusive application performance problems that reveal themselves only when you look at them from the right vantage point.

Application performance equals business performance. Apps have transformed how businesses operate, have increased productivity, and have enabled numerous innovative markets. Developers make this possible. As indispensable as applications have become, users expect more features as needs evolve and depend on developers to deliver these frequently, without compromising reliability or around-the-clock availability. Failing to do so will drive users to competitors or alternatives.

Read this whitepaper to learn more.

SteelCentral gives you a holistic view of performance and diagnostics across applications, networks, infrastructure and end user experience. The platform has also been named a “Leader” in the Gartner 2015 NPMD Magic Quadrant.

Empower your organization to simplify branch IT. Download our white paper for best practices on developing an end-to-end strategy for branch converged infrastructure.

By reading this brief, you will understand the 5 warning signs it’s time to rethink your branch IT, and how to embrace Zero Branch IT for greater data protection, better agility, maximum business continuity, optimal performance, and lower TCO.

The rapid increase of cloud-based services, and dynamic business expectations to enable customers is redefining the "edge" of organizations — branch offices, storefronts, remote locations. This paper explores the challenges and IT requirements for delivering better services to the front lines of the organization.

Branch offices are the growth engines of today's enterprises. So when you consider that, on average, more than 50% of an organizations employees are located in branch offices, nearly 50% of corporate data resides in them, and 50% of IT dollars are spent powering them, the overhead and investments seem reasonable.

But while branch offices and other remote sites are critical for productivity and revenue generation, they're also a giant headache for IT to manage.

Why? Because all of that data is often in high-risk places and subject to loss, and backups are expensive, time consuming, and inefficient. Same goes with provisioning new physical servers and sites or restoring offices if downtime occurs. And lastly, think of the people in these branches. Few of them are skilled IT pros who can actually help keep branch applications and services in tiptop shape.

Spending all of this time, money, end effort managing branch IT makes you wonder if there's a better solution. Good news there is. And with today's launch of Riverbed SteelFusion 4.0, we can simply take a look at something were all quite familiar with to figure it out: our smartphones.

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning? According to a recent study, 84% of smartphone owners check their phones as soon as the alarm clock rings. As society becomes increasingly hooked on being connected anytime and anywhere, the notion of ‘work’ as a place to go from 9 to 5 is changing. For many people, the work environment is now fluid— constrained only by the number of reception bars on their wireless devices. In fact, Gartner predicts that the bring your own device (BYOD) trend will result in a 200 – 300% increase in mobile workers in 2014.

The realities of the modern IT landscape are daunting. Your business-critical applications are multi-platform, multi-tier, and span physical, virtual, and hybrid cloud environments. To reach your end user, application transactions traverse complex networks and infrastructure that are handling ever-increasing loads. In light of this, never has it been more challenging to monitor the performance and availability of the business services that your employees and customers count on.

Read this whitepaper to see how Riverbed delivers application service levels you can count on.

As organizations rely on IT to support critical business processes to an ever-greater degree, the importance of application performance management (APM) is growing. Gone are the days when systems monitoring and management could focus on components in isolation; instead, organizations must ensure that applications are operating at top efficiency from end to end to support critical business processes. This requires a holistic focus on the end user’s application experience.

With SteelCentral AppInternals and SteelCentral AppResponse, Riverbed Technology provides products designed to help IT monitor, detect, and diagnose application performance problems, no matter where end users are located or how they access the IT infrastructure. To better understand the business value of Riverbed APM solutions, IDC recently conducted a study of Riverbed customers, examining how they deployed and are using APM tools and the benefits delivered to their IT staff and the broader business.