The most frustrating thing about wide area network (WAN) optimization from the perspective of the channel is how many IT organizations need it versus how few actually deploy it.

The biggest stumbling block when it comes to WAN optimization has been the cost of deploying the appliances in remote offices and related ongoing management overhead.

But now word comes of a new cloud computing service from Riverbed Technology for delivering WAN optimization. Riverbed may not be the first company to deliver WAN optimization via the cloud, and solution providers can be certain that a raft of similar services will soon hit the market. What’s important to remember is that deploying WAN optimization as service is becoming a lot simpler.

In the case of Riverbed, the company has rolled out Riverbed Cloud Steelhead, an implementation of the company’s wide area network optimization offering designed specifically for the cloud, and Riverbed Whitewater, a new appliance offering that integrates on premise storage systems with cloud computing platforms at very high speeds. The new Riverbed offerings, he said, help cloud computing applications installed on public cloud infrastructure run as much as 20 times faster.

Eric Wolford, Riverbed senior vice president of marketing and business development, said Riverbed is taking care to make sure that its existing Steelhead appliance can be integrated with its new cloud computing offerings because by definition cloud computing needs to be deployed in a  hybrid model. To help simplify the management of this process, Riverbed is also making available a Steelhead Discovery Agent, which keeps track of virtual and physical servers are they move across hybrid clouds.

The current iteration of the Riverbed Cloud Steelhead offering supports the Amazon EC2 and Virtual Cloud Platforms. Support for additional cloud computing platforms will be forthcoming. Pricing for the Riverbed service will be based on a subscription model that customers can manage via a new Riverbed Cloud Portal.

The Riverbed Whitewater appliance, which includes built in data deduplication and encryption capabilities supports cloud storage services from EMC, AT&T and Amazon.

When it comes to cloud computing, clearly the wide area network is the weakest link. That creates significant opportunities for solution providers to optimize the performance of applications in the cloud using either software-only or appliance-based approaches. The important thing to remember is that for cloud computing to really succeed, a host of latency-sensitive applications running in the cloud will need to run as well as they do on premise today. And without some form of WAN optimization, that’s not going to happen.