Moving to Office 365 (O365) was critical for this customer – the savings on license fees and management of local servers onsite alone provided the business case for change. 

But once the migration was completed, the project’s success was impacted by slower response and load times of their O365 applications. This was especially true when larger files were accessed through the corporate WAN at busy times. It took the shine off what had been an amazing migration project, one that started the whole cloud transformation conversation for the customer.

Action needed to be taken when users started asking why response times had got worse.

When the company turned to us for help, we suggested technology from Riverbed – a tried and trusted BT partner.

The company had already considered a range of vendors that claimed to offer accelerated SaaS services, but agreed Riverbed was the right technology and that we should enable, manage and deploy the solution.

This offered the company reduced risk and improved cashflow because we offer a flexible lease model with fixed monthly rentals – an ideal option to keep cash within the business.

We set about designing a service for branch offices that would accelerate performance and give users a better experience, using historic network metrics to show the benchmark for performance gains and the resulting business case. 

The first phase of the solution involved accelerating office-to-cloud performance by deploying Riverbed SteelHead devices into the company’s headquarters and each of their branches, and configuring these using the pre-provisioned virtual clients hosted in O365. 

The service immediately showed performance improvements of over 49% on weekly data transfers of 2.1 tebibytes (about 2,300 gigabytes). This virtually slashed the waiting time in half.

The next phase is to roll out the solution to the company’s homeworkers by downloading SaaS software clients onto homeworker PCs. This should ensure they can achieve the same performance improvements remotely.