How our managed SaaS acceleration service shows the way to improved performance

Overview

Cloud first and O365?

Moving to 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.

With users asking why responses had gotten worse, action needed to be taken.

The challenge

Improving response and showing results

With delayed O365 performance came frustrated calls from users and it was clear that the IT team needed a resolution. When they turned to us for help, we  suggested technology from Riverbed – a tried and trusted BT partner. The customer 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 customer 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.

The solution

Riverbed SaaS Acceleration services

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 their 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 (1 Tebibyte equals 1K Gigabytes).

This virtually slashed the waiting time in half.  The next phase is to roll out the solution to their homeworkers by downloading SaaS software clients onto homeworker PCs, so that the same performance improvements can be achieved remotely.

The result 

A single source of truth, rapidly accessible from anywhere

A 15MB Excel file or 30MB PowerPoint file that previously took minutes to open now opens in half that time. Company-wide - across 2,600 workers - the time savings are approx. 260 hours weekly and represent a strong return on investment – equivalent gains in productivity to having extra employees.

More efficient collaboration and a mobilised workforce

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 with people not working from local versions of stored information.

Importantly, in the future, the company plans to include the software SaaS clients for workers at home, which 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.