After moving to Office 365, the company experienced slower response times for many applications – especially when attempting to access large files through the corporate WAN at busy times.
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.
Across the company’s 2,600 workers, the time savings are approximately 260 hours a week, and represent a strong return on investment – equivalent gains in productivity to having extra employees.
The challenge
With their use of SaaS Accelerator from BT, the customer has been able to expand the value of SaaS applications like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce to the business.
The solution
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.
The result
A 15MB Excel file or 30MB PowerPoint file that previously took minutes to open now opens in half the time.
Across the company’s 2,600 workers, the time savings are approximately 260 hours a week, and represent a strong return on investment – equivalent gains in productivity to having extra employees.
Now that employees can quickly open and save files on the file server, they’re less tempted to download files to their laptops, which means there’s more consistency across the organisation. Fewer people are working from local versions of stored information.
Importantly, in the future, the company plans to include the software SaaS clients for workers at home. This will offer the same productivity benefits and O365 experience at home, or remotely. It’s an inclusive strategy that gives flexibility and performance to workers wherever they connect from.
It also supports a flexible worker strategy that’s key to improving workforce satisfaction across the business.
