Pre-GITEX Interview with Mena Migally from Riverbed

Catch a pre-GITEX interview with Mena Migally, Riverbed’s Regional Vice President, META. Let’s have a peek at what Riverbed has been up to.

TECHx: How excited are you for GITEX Technology Week? What are your hopes for this year’s event?

Migally: Riverbed sees GITEX as one of the main trade shows in our regional events calendar, and we have maintained a regular presence at the show. This year is especially exciting for Riverbed with some announcements regarding the expansion and augmentation of our solution portfolio. This will translate to new and enhanced capabilities in end-to-end visibility and application acceleration solutions for our customers. It also means more innovative use cases that our channel partners can deliver through the Riverbed portfolio. Our presence at GITEX will give us the opportunity to announce these major updates and educate our customers, partners, and prospects on the benefits they can realise as a result.

TECHx: Please tell us about your most recent enterprise solutions.

Migally: In the run-up to GITEX, we unveiled the latest enhancement to Riverbed’s Network Performance Management (NPM) portfolio. We now offer the leading and only unified network visibility solution that collects every packet, all flows and all infrastructure metrics, 100% of the time. With the recent enhancements, it enables greater cloud visibility that is crucial to monitoring productivity and performance, as organizations continue to shift toward hybrid and multi-cloud network environments.

Riverbed NetProfiler is critical to NetOps and SecOps teams and is focused on gaining more in-depth traffic insights from Azure and AWS flow logs to proactively identify and quickly remediate performance and security issues while gaining cost and latency efficiencies. It also relieves the loss of visibility in migrating applications to Azure or AWS Cloud.

TECHx: What opportunities do you see in the Middle Eastern hybrid cloud industry, and how are you positioned vis-à-vis the competition?

Migally: Adoption of cloud has accelerated in the region in recent years and today, the majority of organizations have embraced the hybrid model. While there are clear benefits to this approach, IT teams must address the challenges it potentially raises. The sprawling nature of the hybrid infrastructure means IT teams are left with a complete lack of visibility into their network performance and employee activity. Subsequently, they are now faced with a vast increase in performance issues.

According to a Riverbed research study, weaker employee productivity (37%), increased anxiety (36%), lack of work motivation (34%) and difficulty engaging with customers (34%) are all an impact of poor visibility across hybrid networks. Therefore, it is essential for leaders to invest in the right network performance management solutions which provide a comprehensive overview of all the activity on the network, so that issues can be identified and resolved quickly. This means embracing technology that not only collects information from every device connected, but also analyses and produces insights from the data across all user applications. With this insight, businesses across multiple infrastructures are in a better position to respond to slow running applications or troubleshoot any network inefficiencies employees may be experiencing.

In addition to the right network performance management technologies, organisations must also implement application acceleration tools to mitigate the impact of latency and bandwidth related network issues. Used in conjunction with increased visibility of the network, these tools allow organisations to optimise application performance, drive employee productivity and ultimately ensure the long-term success of business operations.