The real cost isn’t just compute, storage and bandwidth. ����’s time, people, operational drag, missed opportunities—and what many teams quietly refer to as the double bubble: paying twice for infrastructure while waiting for data to arrive.

Ģ������Ƶ Data Express fundamentally changes those economics.

The Myth of “Free” Data Movement

DIY data movement is usually justified as a cost-saving measure. After all, the tools appear deceptively inexpensive, and the cloud is already paid for.

But those apparent savings disappear quickly when transfers stretch from days into weeks, or weeks into months. Organizations frequently underestimate the operational overhead required to make DIY approaches work at scale. Teams must spend significant time learning different tools, integrating them into a cohesive workflow, and continuously managing performance issues along the way.

The hidden costs add up fast. Businesses often end up paying for extended infrastructure usage in both the source and destination environments while also absorbing licensing fees, support costs, and the labor required to orchestrate, monitor, retry, document, and troubleshoot transfers. Delays and failures can also slow critical initiatives such as cloud migrations, analytics projects, and AI deployments, postponing the business value these projects were meant to deliver.

What starts as a “no-cost” approach can easily become a budget drain hiding in plain sight, a huge delay in attaining business objectives, and even career derailment for those who took on complex DIY projects and failed to deliver results.

The Double Bubble: Pay Twice, Wait Longer

One of the costliest financial impacts of slow or unreliable data movement is the double bubble. This challenge arises when a business must migrate their data from one cloud to another for reasons such as an acquisition or divestiture, consolidation of applications, or simply for a better cost structure in a different region or cloud.  

With such projects, there typically is a business plan that targets new revenue, cost synergies for merged entities, or reduced cost of operations as a business scales or serves a larger base of customers.  They key is to complete the migration quickly to reach the new state of the business.

When data transfers take too long, organizations are forced to:

• Keep legacy environments running longer than planned
• Pay for cloud infrastructure that sits idle waiting for data
• Maintain parallel systems, licenses, and support contracts

In other words, you pay twice—once for where the data is, and again for where it needs to be—while gaining value from neither.

Data Express attacks the double bubble directly by compressing migration timelines. 

Faster, predictable data transfers mean legacy environments can be decommissioned sooner and target environments become productive faster. The savings compound quickly.

Time Is Money—Especially in Migration and AI

Speed isn’t just a technical metric. ����’s a financial one. Every day a migration is delayed pushes back cloud ROI, postpones modernization goals, and slows AI and analytics initiatives that depend on timely access to data.

DIY approaches often fail to account for time value. Data Express consistently reduces data movement windows from weeks to days—or days to hours—changing the economics of the entire initiative.

With Data Express, faster data movement allows organizations to realize cloud savings sooner, accelerate analytics initiatives, and begin training and deploying AI models earlier in the process.

The business impact arrives sooner—not just eventually.

Headcount: The Most Overlooked ROI Lever

DIY data movement consumes people. Highly skilled engineers spend days or weeks writing scripts, managing retries, troubleshooting failed transfers, tuning performance, and coordinating workflows across different environments and cloud providers. This work is not strategic—and it doesn’t scale.

Data Express dramatically reduces the operational burden by automating and simplifying the transfer process. With centralized visibility, resilient transfers, and predictable performance at scale, organizations can dramatically reduce the amount of manual intervention required. This allows engineering teams to redirect their expertise toward innovation and higher-value projects rather than ongoing transfer maintenance and troubleshooting.

The result is lower ongoing labor costs and the ability to redeploy scarce engineering talent to higher-value initiatives. In many organizations, this headcount efficiency alone justifies the investment.

Egress Fees: The Unavoidable Tax on Multi-cloud Data Movement

Beyond lost opportunity costs, there are actual hard costs in moving data.  One of the most significant is cloud egress fees, which are charged when data is transferred out of cloud environments—between different cloud providers or different regions within the same cloud provider, or to on-premises systems. These fees can be substantial when dealing with petabytes of data. 

It can easily cost $50,000-90,000 in egress charges to move one PB of data out of a cloud provider, although each of the four major hyperscalers have different rates depending on various factors including where the data resides, so actual costs do vary.  And remember, you may be moving multiple petabytes, and with AI, you will likely need to do this repeatedly to refresh your AI models.

Egress charges with Data Express can be a fraction of that, depending on data type. When you use Data Express to make the move, the Ģ������Ƶ  can reduce that data up to 90%, depending on its reducibility. Further, Data Express builds a dynamic Data Fabric that scales to 100’s of Gbps of network capacity, enjoying significant cost reductions compared to basic egress. And, you only pay for the actual data moving across the network.

So Data Express brings big savings over what you would pay otherwise with egress charges. This is one more part of the TCO that you should be considering in your DIY equation.

Risk Reduction Is a Financial Outcome

Failed or incomplete transfers aren’t just technical issues—they’re financial risks. Data loss, improper data movement, corruption, or partial migrations lead to:

• Rework and delays
• Compliance exposure
• Loss of stakeholder confidence

DIY tools often lack enterprise-grade verification, resilience, and auditability, increasing both operational risk and cost. Data Express reduces these risks with built-in integrity checks, security controls, and reliability at scale—lowering the likelihood of costly remediation or compliance issues.

Predictability Enables Better Financial Planning

Another hidden cost of DIY approaches is unpredictability. When transfer performance varies widely or projects frequently encounter delays, organizations struggle to accurately plan migration timelines, decommission legacy systems, and forecast cloud spending.

This unpredictability forces conservative planning—longer overlap periods, larger buffers, and higher spend “just in case.”

Data Express provides deterministic performance, allowing organizations to confidently align migration timelines with financial plans, schedule cutovers more accurately, and reduce unnecessary overlap between old and new environments.

Predictability itself becomes a cost-saving mechanism.

From Cost Center to Strategic Enabler

Perhaps the biggest financial shift is psychological. DIY makes data movement a cost center—something to minimize, delay, or work around.

Data Express reframes it as a strategic enabler:

• Migrations become repeatable and reversible
• Multi-cloud strategies become economically viable
• AI initiatives accelerate without ballooning budgets

When data can move quickly and reliably, organizations stop paying the hidden taxes associated with rigidity and delay.

The Bottom Line

DIY data movement may appear less expensive at first glance, but the hidden costs often tell a very different story. Extended migration timelines, duplicated infrastructure costs, higher labor demands, operational risk, and delayed business outcomes can quickly outweigh any perceived savings from using free or open-source tools.

Ģ������Ƶ Data Express eliminates these hidden costs by turning data movement into a predictable, scalable, and financially efficient capability.

The question is no longer “How much does data movement cost?” ����’s “How much value are we leaving on the table by doing it the hard way?”

Learn more .

That mental model no longer holds.

Today, enterprises need to move data quickly between cloud providers and cloud regions,—securely, reliably, and at scale. And with that need comes something far more powerful than faster transfers: a fundamental shift in how organizations think about cloud migrations, analytics, and AI.

From “Move Once” to “Move Freely”

Cloud migration strategies used to be built around finality. Choose a target cloud. Move the data. Lock it in place.

Why? Because moving petabytes of data across clouds or regions was painful, slow, expensive, risky, and operationally disruptive.

That all changes with Ģ������Ƶ Data Express. When organizations can easily and quickly move data clouds and cloud regions, that finality disappears.

Ģ������Ƶ Data Express enables organizations to move massive volumes of data across clouds and regions, turning data mobility into a strategic advantage for migration, resilience, and AI. It removes the friction from large‑scale data movement. It delivers high‑speed, secure, and predictable transfer of massive datasets across AWS, Oracle Cloud, and their regions—so organizations can migrate faster, build resilient multi‑cloud architectures, and fuel AI with the data that matters, wherever it lives.

With Data Express, data is no longer something you relocate once and optimize around forever. It becomes portable, strategic, and continuously optimized. This fundamentally changes migration itself. Cloud migration stops being a one‑time project and becomes an ongoing capability.

Multi‑Cloud Finally Works the Way It Was Promised

Multi‑cloud has long been discussed but rarely realized at scale. The reason wasn’t lack of intent—it was lack of data mobility.

Applications can be replicated. Infrastructure can be cloned. But data—especially massive, mission‑critical datasets—has traditionally resisted movement. That created de-facto lock‑in, even when organizations used multiple clouds.

Now with Ģ������Ƶ Data Express, organizations can:

• Rebalance datasets between regions to reduce latency, improve user experience, or meet regulatory requirements
• Shift large datasets to where compute is most cost‑effective at any given moment
• Move data between regions for business resiliency
• Run Oracle‑centric workloads close to OCI services while feeding analytics or AI pipelines in AWS

Multi‑cloud stops being a diagram on a slide and starts behaving like an operational reality.

Region-to-Region Data Movement Enables True Cloud Resilience

You can now redefine business continuity and disaster recovery with Data Express. The ability to move data between OCI regions and between AWS regions also transforms static, pre‑provisioned replicas that may or may not stay in sync. With Data express, you can:

• Rapidly replicate or refresh datasets securely across regions
• Recover massive volumes of data without days—or weeks—of downtime
• Treat regional failures and global uncertainty as recoverable events, not existential threats
• Leverage economic and technical advantages of different cloud providers

This same regional mobility also supports data residency requirements, performance optimization for global users, and workload placement based on evolving business needs.

With Data Express, resilience becomes dynamic, not brittle.

AI Changes Everything, and Data Movement Makes AI Possible

AI doesn’t just consume data. It demands data—large volumes of it, rapidly accessible and often centralized for training.

Here’s the challenge: enterprise data is everywhere. Just a few examples include:

• Your proprietary enterprise data from ERP, SCM, CRM might be in OCI
• Human interaction data such as customer, service logs, expert advice in AWS
• Multi-modal data such as images, video, sensor data scattered across regions

Without fast, secure data movement, AI initiatives stall before they start. But with Data Express, data can move freely across clouds and regions, so AI architectures can change dramatically. Training data can be aggregated without months of preparation. Model training can run where the best GPUs or lowest costs exist. Inference pipelines can pull fresh data regardless of where it originated.

In short, AI velocity accelerates with data agility.

Organizations that can move data quickly can experiment faster, retrain models more frequently, run Agents faster and operationalize AI at scale.

Data Gravity Becomes a Strategic Choice, Not a Constraint

For years, “data gravity” meant something you worked around. Once data landed in a cloud or region, everything else was pulled toward it. Now, gravity is something you can intentionally create or release.

Need analytics closer to business users? Move the data.

Need AI compute elsewhere? Move the data.

Need to exit a region, rebalance costs, or modernize architecture? Move the data.

When data movement is reliable and repeatable, architectural decisions stop being permanent compromises. They become fluid optimizations.

The New Cloud Operating Model

The ability to move data across AWS regions, across OCI regions, and between AWS and OCI doesn’t just improve performance. It reshapes organizational thinking.

Leading enterprises are moving toward a new model where:

• Data is treated as a shared, agile asset
• Clouds are execution environments, not destinations
• Migrations are reversible
• AI pipelines are unconstrained by data silos

The cloud stops being a place you move to and becomes a platform you continuously optimize across.

Data Agility Is the New Competitive Advantage

The next phase of cloud adoption won’t be defined by which provider you choose—but by how freely your data can move between them. Organizations that embrace this shift will migrate faster with less risk, extract more value from multi‑cloud investments, and build AI systems that aren’t limited by geography or vendor boundaries.

Data Express transforms data movement from a bottleneck into a capability—making cloud migrations reversible, multi‑cloud strategies practical, and AI initiatives unconstrained by where data resides.

In a world where data fuels every competitive advantage, agility is no longer optional. ����’s foundational.

With Ģ������Ƶ Data Express for the first time, it’s truly fast, easy, secure and achievable. Learn more here.

In today’s digital enterprise, data is the fuel—and moving it efficiently is mission-critical. Whether you’re training AI models, migrating workloads, or enabling hybrid cloud strategies, the ability to move massive datasets quickly, securely, and cost-effectively can make or break your business outcomes.

That’s where Ģ������Ƶ Data Express Service comes in. ��

The Business Challenge: Data Gravity Meets Cloud Complexity

As a business executive, you’re navigating a world where your enterprise data is sprawled across clouds, regions, and on-premise environments. AI and analytics workloads are growing exponentially, and every delay in data movement means idle GPUs, missed insights, wasted spend, and ultimately failed business initiatives.

You need a solution that’s:

• Fast to keep up with AI-scale data demands
• Simple to deploy without friction
• Secure to meet enterprise compliance
• Insightful to give you control and visibility

Ģ������Ƶ Data Express Service delivers on all four.

1. Fast: Move Petabytes Per Day—Literally

Data Express Service is engineered for speed, offering transfer rates from 5TB to 40TB per hour—that’s up to 1PB per day. With support for concurrent transfers and continuous sync, you can scale to meet even the most demanding AI or cloud migration workloads.

Compared to alternative available solutions, Data Express Service delivers nearly 10x the performance at peak.

2. Easy: SaaS Simplicity and Better Economics

Forget complex configurations or hidden costs. Data Express Service is a fully managed SaaS platform—no VMs to deploy or manage, no tuning required. The power of Ģ������Ƶ SteelHeads are under the cover, ready to move petabytes of data. You pay only for what you move, with a consumption-based pricing model that aligns with your cloud economics. For many data types, the service can reduce cloud egress costs up to 90%, reducing overall cost of data migration.

Setup takes minutes via a simple user interface and integration is seamless via REST APIs. It works across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure today, with planned services for multi-cloud (AWS, OCI, Azure, Google Cloud Ģ������Ƶ) and data center connectivity. 

3. Secure: Built for Enterprise-Grade Protection

Security is non-negotiable. Data Express Service is multi-tenant by design, with RBAC, SSO/IAM, and tenant isolation at both the control and data layers. Data in transit is protected with post-quantum cryptography (PQC) secure tunnels.

You can even deploy agents inside your own cloud or data center fabric to apply your existing security policies.

4. Insightful: Real-Time Visibility and Governance

From day one, you get deep visibility into job status, throughput, file counts, and history—all through a unified portal. Over time, Ģ������Ƶ is adding outcome-oriented insights like time saved, top data movers, and trend analysis.

Advanced analytics and alerting integrate with your workflows, giving you the observability and governance you need to stay in control.

Use Cases That Matter to CIOs

Ģ������Ƶ Data Express Service is purpose-built for the modern CIO agenda:

• AI/ML Training and Inference: Feed GPU clusters faster to avoid idle compute.
• Cloud-to-Cloud Transfers: Support multi-cloud strategies with ease.
• Data Center to Cloud Migrations: Modernize apps and analytics.
• Disaster Recovery: Replicate data securely and quickly.
• Edge-to-Core Consolidation: Centralize IoT and remote data.

Whether you’re in financial services, healthcare, media, or manufacturing, Data Express Service adapts to your enterprise needs.

Why Now?

The Ģ������Ƶ Data Express Service is currently in limited availability, with general availability coming soon. If you’re a CIO looking to future-proof your data infrastructure, now is the time to engage.

You can subscribe via Ģ������Ƶ sales or partners, with options for pay-as-you-go or enterprise subscriptions. Training and onboarding are available through Ģ������Ƶ Academy.

Final Thought: Data Movement Is Now a Strategic Priority

In the AI era, data movement is no longer a backend task—it’s a strategic enabler. Ģ������Ƶ Data Express Service gives CIOs the speed, simplicity, security, and insights needed to lead in a data-driven world.

Ready to move at the speed of innovation? Contact your Ģ������Ƶ representative to learn more or request early access.

Here’s how:

Modern software

1. RiOS 10: Ģ������Ƶ’s newest network fabric software is the cornerstone of SteelHead acceleration technology, designed to meet the rigorous demands of AI. Not available on the SteelHead 70 series, RiOS 10 sets a new standard for performance, security and agility.

Enhanced performance

2. Unmatched Speed: Experience up to 3X performance improvement with the SteelHead 90 Series appliances over the legacy SteelHead 70 series, all at competitive price points. Or get similar improvements with SteelHead Virtual on comparable CPUs in virtualized environments using ESXi, KVM and Hyper-V.

3. Next-Gen CPUs: Built on advanced Intel CPUs, the 90 series leverages new instruction sets and compression capabilities, achieving up to 6 Gbps of accelerated traffic on the WAN—translating to as much as 60 Gbps of data movement in each direction. Get comparable performance on similar CPUs with SteelHead Virtual.

4. Quality-of-Service (QoS): Ensure optimal network performance by prioritizing critical applications, reducing latency, and managing bandwidth effectively.

Advanced security

In an era of escalating cyber threats, the SteelHead 90 series is a vital upgrade for maintaining data integrity and compliance. Not available on the 70 series, new security features on the 90 series include:

5. Secure Boot: Verifies the integrity of firmware and software during boot, preventing unauthorized or malicious code from running.

6. Tamper Proof Modules (TPMs): Enhance security by securely managing cryptographic keys, verifying boot integrity, and providing hardware-based security.

7. Total Memory Encryption (TME): Encrypts all data passing to and from the CPU, protecting sensitive information from physical attacks.

8. Post-Quantum Cryptography: Safeguards data from quantum computer attacks with algorithms resistant to quantum decryption, ensuring long term security.

Future-ready acceleration

Ģ������Ƶ Flex offers a subscription-based model that decouples acceleration software licenses from hardware. Not available on the 70 series, Ģ������Ƶ Flex provides three critical business values:

9. Architectural Freedom: Get seamless license portability across hardware, virtual, and cloud environments, enabling rapid adaptation to changing business needs. With Ģ������Ƶ Flex, you can easily move acceleration licenses at no cost from SteelHead 90 series appliances to SteelHead Virtual and SteelHead Cloud on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud Ģ������Ƶ, ensuring unparalleled flexibility and future-proofing your acceleration infrastructure.

10. Optimized ROI: Right-size your acceleration needs with an OPEX approach, protecting investments and improving total cost of ownership.

11. Future-Proofing: Access the latest acceleration capabilities, allowing your organization to scale and evolve with technological advancements.

Take the next step towards unmatched data movement

Don’t let outdated infrastructure hold you back. Upgrade to the new SteelHead family with SteelHead 90 series, SteelHead Virtual and SteelHead Cloud, and experience the pinnacle of performance, security, and flexibility. Empower your organization to confidently meet the demands of the AI era with Ģ������Ƶ.

Contact us or your Ģ������Ƶ representative, or visit us at riverbed.com to learn more.

I am thrilled to share our strategy for the future of networking in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Imagine a network that adapts effortlessly to every challenge, ensuring performance and security no matter the obstacle. That’s our vision for resilient networking—empowering your operations with peak performance, secure data flow, and smarter decision-making to strengthen your business’s resilience.

In today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape, the intersection of data and AI is reshaping the way businesses operate. Ģ������Ƶ, a pioneer in Acceleration and resilient networking, is at the forefront of this transformation. With over two decades of innovation, Ģ������Ƶ continues to lead the charge—unveiling a suite of new products designed to empower enterprises in this dynamic era of AI.

The Era of AI and Data Movement 

The rise of AI is accelerating transformation across industries at an incredible pace. AI thrives on data—vast amounts of it. To harness the full potential of AI, all this data has to move from where it resides to where it is needed, necessitating a re-evaluation of networking infrastructures. We are talking about transferring terabytes to petabytes of data daily from data centers, the edge, and clouds. 

Ģ������Ƶ’s commitment to Acceleration is evident in our customers adoption of our products, with 59% YoY growth in Q1’25. This demand, and the need to move massive amounts of data, fueled the roadmap and new offerings. The new SteelHead solutions are engineered to handle the massive data movement required by AI, enterprise, and edge applications. These innovations ensure that data flows seamlessly, enabling enterprises to leverage AI for enhanced operational efficiency and strategic decision-making. 

Performance = Time. Time = Business Success.

A fundamental impact of AI is a total rethink of time—specifically, how long it takes to achieve business outcomes. Whether it’s a factory adjusting operations in hours instead of months, a bank making real-time decisions on financial algorithms, or a life-sciences company evaluating DNA samples in the race for a cure—success is increasingly measured by how quickly results are delivered.

In this context, performance is no longer just about speed. With resilient networking, performance means enabling outcomes within the required timeframe. That could mean transferring terabytes of data in hours instead of days, delivering the latest inference models to edge locations in seconds rather than hours, or enabling applications to access data in milliseconds instead of minutes.

SteelHead Innovation in the Age of AI 

At the core of these advancements is RiOS 10, the latest iteration of Ģ������Ƶ’s Acceleration software. RiOS 10 delivers peak data movement performance while ensuring secure delivery through advances like quantum-ready networking and confidential computing. Its capabilities power ten new SteelHead solutions for data center, cloud, and edge.

➤ SteelHead Cloud and SteelHead Virtual 

Powered by RiOS 10, SteelHead Cloud and SteelHead Virtual enable enterprises to move data and applications at speeds up to 20 Gbps, ensuring optimal application performance, faster delivery, and significant cost savings compared to traditional methods. This enables enterprises to seamlessly leverage AI for enhanced operational efficiency and strategic decision-making. SteelHead Virtual delivers these capabilities on virtualized customer environments and private clouds. 

Supporting customers’ multi-cloud strategies, we’ve expanded availability to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Google Cloud Ģ������Ƶ, in addition to AWS and Microsoft Azure. SteelHead Cloud is available directly from each cloud provider’s marketplace. 

➤ SteelHead Appliances 

Ģ������Ƶ’s commitment to acceleration is evident in our latest Series 90 appliance offerings. These four new SteelHead appliances are engineered to handle the massive on-premise data movement required by AI, enterprise, and edge applications. 

Ģ������Ƶ’s new SteelHead appliances deliver unparalleled performance, with the top end 8090 model offering up to 60 Gbps of data movement, translating to up to 21 Terabytes of data movement across vast distances per hour. The 8090 can be clustered to deliver multiples of these performance levels for large enterprise needs. Built on next-generation Intel CPUs, these appliances achieve remarkable throughput enabling vastly increased performance. This performance is crucial for applications that require rapid data transfer found in many industries. 

➤ SteelHead RS for Edge Computing 

To further help customers overcome the unique challenges of edge computing, Ģ������Ƶ is also introducing SteelHead RS, a new software solution that solves the challenges of unreliable networks often found in edge computing locations. SteelHead RS maintains copies of business-critical data at the edge and provides near real-time accelerated data synchronization between the edge and core, either a data center or cloud. 

➤ Built-In Security for a Quantum Future 

As data movement increases, so does the exposure of sensitive information. This data is a lucrative target for threat actors, who may employ sophisticated techniques such as “harvest now, decrypt later” using emerging quantum technology.  

Ģ������Ƶ’s resilient networking solutions prioritize security, ensuring that data remains protected against current and future threats. The introduction of Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) in Ģ������Ƶ’s RiOS 10 software is a testament to this commitment. PQC safeguards data tunnels, making them resistant to decryption by quantum computers. It also integrates advanced protections like Confidential Computing, Secure Boot, TPMs, and Total Memory Encryption—making SteelHead solutions tamper-proof and protecting data in transit and at rest. 

This security-first approach is also recognized by our partners. As Purnam Sheth, Vice President and GM of Trust & Security Products at Intel Corporation, shared:

“Protecting systems and data has never been more critical, especially when working with sensitive, confidential, or regulated information. We’re proud to collaborate with Ģ������Ƶ and their new RiOS 10 SteelHead Acceleration solutions, which are designed to take advantage of Intel® Trust Domain Extensions (Intel® TDX) for enhanced protection. Looking ahead, we see opportunities for deeper integration with services like Intel® Tiber™ Trust Authority, which provides independent, zero trust verification for the integrity of computing environments. We’re excited about the potential it holds for advancing security, compliance, and data sovereignty in cloud environments.”

This collaboration with Intel reflects a shared commitment to delivering trusted, secure solutions that help organizations meet today’s compliance requirements while preparing for tomorrow’s cybersecurity landscape.

➤ Agility and Flexibility for Evolving Architectures 

As we are in the early stages of AI adoption, predicting which models and clouds will be optimal for an enterprise is challenging. As AI architectures evolve, so must the network’s capacity and connectivity. Ģ������Ƶ’s solutions are designed to be agile and flexible, allowing enterprises to adapt quickly to changing requirements without committing to long-term contracts or upfront payments.  

Ģ������Ƶ Flex subscriptions exemplify this agility by offering solutions in subscription model that can be used across hardware, virtual, or cloud environments. This architectural freedom enables customers to scale and adjust their network capacity effortlessly, ensuring that they can meet the demands of data movement without friction. 

Moving Your Data Forward 

Ģ������Ƶ’s latest innovations mark a significant leap forward in acceleration and resilient networking. With the introduction of RiOS 10 and ten new solutions, we’re equipping enterprises with the performance, security, and agility needed to succeed in the AI era. 

Learn about our innovations and explore the new acceleration solutions powered by RiOS 10. Visit riverbed.com/ten/ or .

While these challenges are inevitable, having the ability to adjust your technology and costs to align with business needs—rather than the other way around—can make them much easier to navigate. What if IT teams could shift resources on the fly, move licenses seamlessly, and adapt to new challenges without roadblocks? That’s exactly what Ģ������Ƶ FLEX for Acceleration��delivers—a smarter, more agile way to manage network performance.

The IT balancing act: Challenges of network architecture and capacity

Keeping network performance in sync with business needs isn’t easy. Traditional product purchase and licensing models are rigid, making scaling costly and complex. Expanding network capacity often requires additional hardware just to handle short-term spikes, leading to inefficiencies that hinder innovation.

Future-proofing network acceleration is even more challenging. Many existing solutions can’t adapt to fluctuating demands, seasonal surges, or long-term growth, forcing IT teams to make difficult trade-offs between cost, performance, and flexibility.

For years, this was simply the status quo. But today, IT teams have a solution designed for the dynamic environments of modern IT.

Breaking free from locked network architectures

Ģ������Ƶ FLEX for Acceleration is an innovative subscription-based licensing model that removes the limitations of traditional product purchases, migration barriers, and expansion bottlenecks. It gives IT teams the power to scale, move, and optimize network acceleration resources on demand.

Imagine being able to shift acceleration licenses seamlessly across hardware, virtual, and cloud environments—without extra costs or downtime. Just continuous, optimized performance.��

What makes Ģ������Ƶ FLEX unique? ��Here’s how FLEX redefines network acceleration for IT teams like yours:��

• Effortless License Mobility: Move licenses freely across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, adapting in real time to evolving needs.
• Scalable Capacity: Dynamically reallocate acceleration resources to prevent underutilized hardware while ensuring no area experiences congestion.
• Smarter Hardware Upgrades:��Upgrade infrastructure cost-effectively while maintaining full software access—without penalties or new license costs.
• Future-Proofed Investments:��Scale licensing as needed, ensuring your network is always prepared for growth without overspending.
• On-Demand Acceleration: Handle temporary traffic spikes or seasonal demands effortlessly by adding capacity when necessary and scaling back when things stabilize.

Ģ������Ƶ FLEX isn’t just another contract—it’s a fundamental shift in how IT teams manage network acceleration. No more playing catch-up. No more wasted resources. Just an agile, responsive IT infrastructure that works with your business, not against it.

The result? A streamlined IT experience that keeps pace with your business needs.

The future of network agility��

The reality of IT today is that change isn’t slowing down—it’s accelerating. Ģ������Ƶ FLEX for Acceleration isn’t just about addressing today’s challenges; it prepares you for whatever comes next. As a FLEX subscriber, you’ll also receive access to future RiOS software updates at no additional cost, keeping your acceleration solutions aligned with industry innovations.

With the freedom to move, scale, and optimize, you can stop reacting and start leading. When your network moves as fast as your business, the possibilities are limitless.

Unlock a new era of flexibility with Ģ������Ƶ FLEX! Learn more about Ģ������Ƶ FLEX for Acceleration.