Riverbed Technology, the leader in application performance infrastructure, has announced new features for Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager, the number one virtual application delivery controller (ADC).

As companies evolve toward the hybrid enterprise model with private assets on-premises and public services in the cloud, they face new performance challenges — including greater architectural complexity and blind spots for support, management and security. Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager 9.7 addresses these challenges, enabling the hybrid enterprise to access and deliver applications quickly, securely and cost effectively.

“Companies aregoing hybrid in droves, extending their data centers to the cloud, and then often struggling with complexity and performance challenges. Customers buy Riverbed’s SteelApp ADC for the intelligent load balancing of app traffic across the hybrid enterprise and for web optimization to accelerate applications in the cloud,” says Jeff Pancottine, senior vice-president and GM, SteelApp at Riverbed.

“Riverbed SteelApp Traffic Manager 9.7now delivers greater protection against the latest app-level attacks and simpler manageability in the cloud.”

What’s new in SteelApp Traffic Manager 9.7:

* Stand-alone Web App Firewall(WAF): Integrate SteelApp WAF as a stand-alone WAF without changing the application or upgrading existing load balancers. This enables organizations to quickly apply baseline security policies, to help support PCI or HIPAA compliance, and to protect against SQL injection, XSS, CSRF and many other external attacks.

* Now available for Microsoft Azure: Extend the reach of SteelApp Traffic Manager in the cloud with support for Microsoft Azure VHD deployments. Customers can now deploy Microsoft workloads in the optimal cloud platform for Windows workloads and any applications in Microsoft Azure.

* Progressive download:Faster web page views using a new progressive image download capability in SteelApp Web Accelerator. Image Streaming combines images into parallel data streams, which the browser downloads more efficiently than individual images.

SteelApp is a family of application delivery products that provides control of traffic to and from applications, enabling fast, reliable and secure application delivery to users anywhere from the cloud or data center.

It is a complete software-based Layer 7 application delivery controller (ADC) with integrated web content optimization (WCO) and web application firewall (WAF) that enables companies to deliver optimized and secure application delivery services where and when they are needed in an elastic manner.

Riverbed SteelApp is part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform, the most complete platform to enable organizations to embrace location-independent computing, so that business objectives – not technical constraints – drive how applications and data are delivered.