Riverbed Technology has announced that MTC Australia has deployed components of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform for its “cloud first” strategy to accelerate the delivery of Office 365, reduce bandwidth consumption and improve network and application performance.

MTC Australia, a not-for-profit organisation, helps people in Australia gain employment, skills training and work experience. With more than 30 locations and over 500 staff, the organisation assists approximately 35,000 people annually through training courses, employment services, youth programs and community initiatives. In mid-2013, Branko Ceran joined the organisation as CIO and started overhauling its aging infrastructure by implementing a “cloud first” strategy, which included cloud-based Office 365 and Lync, along with other business-critical applications running in MTC Australia’s own private cloud. As a result, on-site applications were going to be hosted remotely, which caused concern about network performance.

“We wanted to move everything we could to the cloud and needed to make this move without impacting application performance for employees,” said Ceran. “With Riverbed, we have accelerated application delivery up to 300%, resulting in sub-second response times for Office 365, which is located in a data centre 4,000 miles away. We have also been able to reduce bandwidth upgrade costs by two-thirds.”

As a result of moving to the cloud, the company’s network traffic increased two to three times, so MTC Australia deployed Riverbed Steelhead to accelerate the delivery of applications and eliminate the need to increase bandwidth. To avoid latency issues with cloud solutions, including Office 365 and other business-critical applications, MTC Australia deployed the Riverbed Steelhead Cloud Accelerator.

MTC Australia also deployed Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager to inspect, prioritise and route application traffic. Riverbed Stingray is the only virtual ADC that is software-based with an “ADC per application” delivery model. Together, the Riverbed Steelhead QoS functionality along with Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager ensure that mission-critical Lync Enterprise voice data has priority over other types of traffic.

Riverbed Steelhead and Riverbed Stingray solutions – part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform – were installed nationally across 28 offices and two data centres in less than a month and began providing immediate results. The Riverbed Application Performance Platform is a set of integrated solutions that give companies the flexibility to host applications and data in the locations that best serve the business while ensuring the flawless delivery of those apps to better leverage global resources, radically reduce the cost of running their business and maximise employee productivity.