In a recent study conducted by Stratecast (a unit of Frost & Sullivan) 81% of line-of-business workers and 83% of IT staff admit to using non-approved SaaS apps. This practice, often referred to as ‘shadow IT’, opens a major gap in visibility, security and performance across the network and is a headache for CIOs. In an effort to shine a light on shadow IT, Silver Peak has unveiled ‘Unity’, a ground-breaking intelligent wide area network fabric (WAN) that unifies the enterprise network with the public cloud.
Unlike traditional WAN optimisation solutions, Unity closely tracks the location of cloud services and internet “weather” to intelligently route traffic by a secure, optimal path. By keeping Cloud SaaS and IaaS traffic on the Unity fabric, IT achieves something it’s never had: the ability to monitor and control connectivity to the cloud while giving users consistent performance for cloud applications. Silver Peak (Hall 1, stand 108) will launch Unity at the upcoming Gitex Technology Week in October 2014.
“The visibility solution is intended to transform the way Middle Eastern enterprises and service providers monitor their networks. Most enterprises use dozens of cloud-based services, whether IT knows about them or not,” said Bhaskar Peruri, regional sales manager for the Middle East at Silver Peak. “The problem is IT staff have no insight into that traffic once it leaves the WAN. They can’t troubleshoot problems or optimise applications the way they would on their own network.
“We are excited about the opportunities that the Middle East and this year’s Gitex Technology Week hold for us. We understand that information security officers face growing pressure to protect terabytes of data on an increasingly unsecured network, manage information safely, especially on the cloud,” added Peruri.
By deploying Silver Peak’s software in data centres, branch offices and cloud interconnection hubs, customers generate the Unity fabric, a network overlay that controls and accelerates connectivity to any combination of enterprise services, IaaS resources, and SaaS applications. Each Silver Peak instance on the Unity fabric communicates with Silver Peak’s new Cloud Intelligence (CI) service, which aggregates ever-changing cloud provider information and minute-to-minute internet weather.
This information is used by Silver Peak to dynamically route traffic to cloud services by optimal paths. Orchestration is handled by Silver Peak’s Global Management System (GMS), which provides IT managers with complete visibility and control of the deployment and use of cloud services.
