Riverbed NPM+: Empowering Work from Anywhere with Enhanced Network Performance

The work-from-home (WFH) model has become a game-changer for IT companies, bringing a host of advantages that reach far beyond mere convenience. For an industry built on digital tools, connectivity and agile response times, remote work is a perfect match. However, with employees accessing cloud and SaaS applications directly from home, a significant portion of network traffic now bypasses the corporate data center, creating a visibility gap for IT teams. Traditional monitoring tools, focused within the data center, lack insights into these direct-to-cloud connections, making it challenging to ensure performance, troubleshoot issues, and uphold security for remote users.

Challenges of work-from-home networks

These blind spots can lead to performance problems, hinder productivity, and increase security risks, as IT cannot fully track or manage this traffic flow. Solutions like Riverbed’s NPM+ address these gaps by extending monitoring to cover all remote traffic, enabling IT teams to manage performance and security comprehensively across distributed networks.

Here are some of the key networking issues that companies and remote employees face with WFH:

• Lack of Network Visibility: IT teams often struggle to maintain complete visibility into network performance when users are accessing company resources from various locations–whether home offices, co-working spaces or other remote environments. Traditional monitoring tools built for on-premise infrastructures fall short in tracking user experience across the complex web of internet service providers, Wi-Fi networks and VPNs.
• Increased Complexity in Troubleshooting: Diagnosing performance issues becomes significantly harder when IT does not have real-time insights into the root cause of the problem—whether it is a local network issue, ISP bottleneck or application-level disruption. Without the right tools, troubleshooting can take much longer, leading to prolonged downtime and reduced employee productivity.
• Lack of Corporate Network Control: In a home environment, IT teams have limited control over the network infrastructure, which makes it difficult to enforce corporate policies like traffic prioritization or security measures. Remote users might face difficulty in accessing critical applications when their networks are overwhelmed by non-business traffic, such as streaming services or multiple users sharing the same connection.
• Troubleshooting and Support Complexity: When remote users experience network reachability problems, IT teams often struggle to troubleshoot the issues because they do not have direct access to home network environments. Troubleshooting network reachability issues remotely is time-consuming, often involving multiple layers of investigation across the user’s device, local network, ISP and corporate infrastructure. This results in extended downtime for employees.

Riverbed NPM+ collects packet metrics from user and server endpoints to deliver deep visibility into complex networking issues that arise in modern, distributed environments such as Work from Home (WFH), cloud and Zero Trust environments. It utilizes Unified-agent to collect decrypted packet data from user and server endpoints. Unified Agent plays a pivotal role in enhancing the functionality and efficiency of NPM+ solution which includes Simplified Deployment and Management, Comprehensive Data Collection, Enhanced Performance and Efficiency, Automatic Updates and Maintenance as discussed in whitepaper.

As employees access corporate resources from home networks, often with varying internet speeds and conditions, maintaining a consistent and reliable network experience becomes a major challenge. Riverbed’s NPM+ directly solves these issues by providing end-to-end visibility, real-time monitoring and performance optimization by ensuring remote workers remain. Find more details in NPM+ datasheet.

How Riverbed NPM+ helps solve the issue

End-to-End Visibility

Riverbed NPM+ provides full visibility into network traffic from the user’s device to corporate applications, whether hosted on-premise or in the cloud or Saas. It offers a holistic view of the entire digital experience, enabling IT teams to monitor user performance no matter where they are working. This visibility helps identify the root cause of performance issues, whether they are related to the user’s local network, ISP, VPN or application performance. Unlike many competitors that focus either on on-premise or cloud environments, it gives IT teams a unified view of network performance from the user’s home network through ISPs, to corporate data centers, and cloud services.

Real-Time Network and Application Monitoring

NPM+ continuously monitors network and application performance in real-time, giving IT teams insights into latency, jitter, packet loss and bandwidth usage across different environments. It helps pinpoint issues such as ISP congestion or home network failures that affect the employee experience. With real-time alerts and monitoring, IT teams can proactively identify and resolve issues before they significantly impact productivity, ensuring smoother access to critical applications like video conferencing and cloud-based tools.

Accelerated Troubleshooting and Diagnostics

NPM+ equips IT teams with advanced diagnostics and troubleshooting capabilities that quickly isolate It offers granular views of network paths and performance metrics, making it easier to distinguish whether issues stem from the user’s home network, ISP or corporate infrastructure. Faster identification of root causes reduces downtime for remote workers and allows IT teams to resolve issues in a timely manner. NPM+ accelerates troubleshooting by identifying the exact source of performance issues, whether it is the user’s home network, ISP, VPN, or application. This reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) significantly.

Improved Security Monitoring

NPM+ provides comprehensive visibility into potential security risks, including anomalous network traffic and unauthorized access attempts. It ensures that users remain secure while accessing corporate resources remotely. By combining performance and security monitoring, NPM+ helps protect remote users from security threats, ensuring that IT can safeguard sensitive data while maintaining performance Riverbed NPM+ integrates security monitoring alongside network performance monitoring, allowing IT teams to detect potential security threats while managing performance. This is especially important for remote workers who may be more vulnerable to cyberattacks on unsecured home networks.

Cloud Performance Management

Riverbed NPM+ helps IT teams monitor the performance of SaaS and cloud-based It tracks how well cloud services are delivering to remote users, identifying any disruptions or slowdowns that may occur due to network or application issues. Proactive cloud monitoring ensures that remote employees can reliably access cloud services, improving both performance and employee satisfaction.

Investing in Riverbed’s NPM+ for long-term success

By choosing Riverbed NPM+, businesses are investing in a solution that offers flexibility, adaptability and advanced tools to address not just current WFH challenges but also future network demands. The combination of real-time visibility, predictive analytics, proactive troubleshooting and strong security integration ensures that Riverbed NPM+ is a future-proof solution, enabling businesses to maintain high performance, security and scalability as the workforce continues to evolve. This investment prepares your organization to meet future challenges head-on, ensuring your network infrastructure is ready for the next generation of work.