Simplifying Encrypted Cloud and SaaS Migrations for the Public Sector

Government organizations are marching forward in their digital transformation, modernization, and cloud migration initiatives.

However, along the way they have encountered new challenges migrating workloads into the cloud and leveraging the potential of SaaS applications on networks that weren’t designed or architected with these modern advancements in mind.

They have encountered new challenges migrating workloads into the cloud and leveraging the potential of SaaS applications on networks that weren’t designed or architected with these modern advancements in mind.

Today, there is exponentially more traffic, creating longer distances between users and on-premises data center TICs and the cloud, resulting in reduced application performance and crippling latency. To compound these issues, over the last several years, nearly 80-90% of public sector network traffic has moved to encrypted SSL/TLS protocols.

While encryption is crucial to protect the integrity and security of data and networks alike, as public sector organizations expand and reimagine their networks to securely support remote or hybrid workforces, the ability to optimize and accelerate SSL/TLS traffic been stymied by logistical challenges and perceived security threats.

Historically, the process to move workloads to the cloud and unlock capacity from SSL/TLS traffic and apps required IT teams to share or create proxies of hundreds, if not thousands, of certificates and keys. The approach was logistically challenging and often led to concerns over increased network attack vectors. These steps were often viewed as too difficult and risky, forcing many organizations to seek alternative, costly, and ineffective solutions to mitigate poor network, application, and end-user performance.

As encrypted traffic started overtaking public sector networks, Riverbed began reengineering its optimization and acceleration solutions to meet the new norm of SSL/TLS encryption. Riverbed’s enhanced acceleration solutions simplify the authentication process of SSL/TLS traffic. Client Accelerator now functions like a Hardware Security Module (HSM) by granting access to the “session” key, which is unique and randomly generated, for each encrypted communication session.

This novel approach to authentication bypasses the traditional SSL/TLS “handshake” that requires public and private keys and certificates and instead allows encrypted network communications between authorized users and applications within the SteelHead optimization fabric. No sensitive keys or credentials are ever exchanged or exposed.

Once an SSL/TLS session is authenticated and an encrypted connection is established, public sector organizations can easily unlock network capacity, seamlessly move workloads and apps to cloud, boost application performance, and improve end-user experiences to ensure mission success.

Riverbed’s SSL/TLS Network Acceleration Solutions Helps Customers:

• Achieve zero-touch SSL/TLS optimization and acceleration
• Unlock critical capacity across any public sector network environment
• Maintain and strengthen network security postures
• Boost the performance of any on-prem or SaaS SSL/TLS applications by up to 10x
• Seamlessly move workloads to the cloud
• Reduce bandwidth requirements by up to 99%▪Realize true value of IT investments
• Transparently operate with mutual authentication (CAC) and advanced TLS (ECDH, PFS)
• Eliminate certificate management