Riverbed tackles AI data bottleneck with new Oracle-based service

Riverbed recently unveiled statement. “We will continue to build on our momentum, helping customers maximize the return on their AI investment.”

According to Riverbed’s 2025 Global AI Research, 75% of 1,200 organizations surveyed plan to establish an AI data repository strategy, with 90% identifying data movement as vital to their AI success. The survey also reports that just one in 10 AI projects extends beyond pilot mode into an enterprise-wide deployment, often due to data quality issues and slow data movement.

“Customers are looking for faster, more secure ways to move massive datasets so they can bring AI initiatives to life,” said Sachin Menon, Oracle’s vice president of cloud engineering, in a statement. “With Riverbed Data Express Service deployed on OCI, organizations will be able to accelerate time to value, reduce costs, and help ensure that their data remains protected.”

Riverbed’s Aras explains that its Data Express Service uses post-quantum cryptography (PQC) to move petabyte-scale datasets through secure VPN tunnels to ensure that customer data remains protected during the transfer process. The technology is based on Riverbed’s SteelHead acceleration platform running RiOS 10 software.

“Our cloud-optimized technology design delivers much higher data retrieval, data movement across the network, and data write rates, through highly performant data mover instances, instance parallelization and matched network fabric configurations. The design is tailored for each cloud, to ensure maximal performance can be achieved using cloud-specific product adjustments,” Aras says.

“The time for preventing harvest-now, decrypt-later is now,” Aras says, referring to the security threat where encrypted data is intercepted and stored for decryption once quantum computers become powerful enough. The Riverbed service addresses use cases spanning AI model training, inference operations, and emerging agentic AI applications.

Data Express is initially deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, but Riverbed said the service will orchestrate data movement across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, as well as on-premises data centers. General availability is planned for Q4 2025.