CloudSwitch teams with Riverbed to enhance the cloud

Cloud enterprise gateway developer CloudSwitch has announced that it is integrating Riverbed Technology’s Cloud Steelhead solution into its platform, in an effort to help its enterprise customers optimize the performance of applications in the cloud and reduce bandwidth requirements and costs.

CloudSwitch Enterprise is a downloadable software appliance that installs in VMware and Xen environments and bridges the enterprise data center with cloud services, essentially extending enterprise security and control into the cloud.

“We make it easy for enterprises to take virtualized resources and transfer them to the public cloud,” said John Considine, founder and chief technology officer of CloudSwitch. “We enhance security in the cloud. We have very big customers using our software to enable them to put workloads in the cloud that they wouldn’t otherwise put there.”

Riverbed’s platform, meanwhile, is designed to boost the performance of applications operating in cloud environments by eliminating performance issues like latency and bandwidth constraints. The two companies have a large overlapping customer base, Considine said, so began exploring how their platforms could work together.

“We started talking about delivering a joint solution with Riverbed so customers could accelerate applications and reduce the costs associated with bandwidth to the cloud,” he said.

With the joint solution, CloudSwitch’s customers can apply Riverbed’s WAN optimization with a point and click, Considine said, and all traffic will be routed through Riverbed’s appliance. There is no additional charge for enterprises to use it, he said. “We’ll continue bringing trusted vendors like this into the environment in a seamless fashion,” he said.