The Steelhead appliances are deployed to support a successful private cloud communications initiative by IJM, including centralization of Exchange 2007 servers, company officials said. The deployment has enabled IJM to dramatically increase data and application access for caseworkers, cut IT costs by avoiding bandwidth upgrades and achieve an ROI in 10 months.

IJM is an international non-profit human rights organization leading the fight against modern-day slavery and other forms of violent oppression. It is dedicated to securing justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation, and other forms of violent oppression.

The non-profit includes a team of lawyers, investigators and aftercare professionals who work with local officials to ensure immediate victim rescue and aftercare, to prosecute perpetrators, and to ensure that poor people are protected from abuse by their laws, courts and police systems.

The non-profit was faced with costly maintenance of legacy remote servers at its regional offices located in the U.S., Asia, Africa and Latin America. The estimated cost of the project was $140,000 for server upgrades. It was too expensive for the organization's IT budget and would divert funds away from the critical casework that is IJM's mission.

Further, by simply upgrading the servers, the organization would not be able to address e-mail performance issues that caseworkers in the field often faced. Speed of e-mail communication is critical to the safety of people working in the field. However, in many remote locations employees were using dial-up or satellite, which made accessing e-mail challenging and often unreliable.

For IJM, the maintenance of e-mail became the most expensive element of the organization's IT infrastructure. IJM found that adding bandwidth was cost-prohibitive, and dispatching IT support to remote locations was very costly as well.

IJM’s IT organization quickly realized they needed to find a better solution that would help them maintain communication with remote workers while at the same time cutting IT costs.

To reduce IT expenditure, the organization decided to centralize their e-mail servers to reduce software and hardware costs by building a private cloud communications infrastructure, John Lax, vice president of information systems at IJM, said.

“However, in order to ensure e-mail was accessible in our 13 remote offices, we chose WAN optimization instead of costly bandwidth upgrades,” Lax said. “Based on our research we determined that bandwidth upgrades would not address the latency issues we were experiencing.”

Riverbed (News - Alert) Steelhead appliances were chosen as the best solution to accelerate the performance of IJM’s IT infrastructure. With this simple solution, the organization was able to centralize its Exchange 2007 servers to its data center without interruption of service to its employees on four continents.

The deployment enabled the non-profit to build a private cloud that addressed its Exchange 2007 performance and upgrade issues, while avoiding costly bandwidth upgrades and accelerating access to critical applications, Lax said.

Steelhead appliances also enabled IJM to run SharePoint for Intranet and training manuals. Before IJM deploys a caseworker or an attorney out to the field, it trains the field teams and equips them with a training manual.

The Steelhead appliance deployment has reduced data traveling across its global WAN satellite links, enabling the organization to implement paperless training manuals, which has both allowed IJM to download from SharePoint faster and save money on printing costs, officials at IJM said.

“With Riverbed Steelhead appliances, we were able to stretch our already thin IT budget and get the job done quicker, avoid unnecessary upgrades and better utilize the infrastructure we already had,” added Lax.

“This enabled our investigators, lawyers and social workers to collaborate in a timelier manner, provide relief and aftercare to victims faster, and work with local partners, community leaders and local judicial systems to lower the risk of future abuse and hold perpetrators accountable,” Lax said.

Riverbed family of WAN optimization solutions increases application performance, enabling consolidation, and providing enterprise-wide network and application visibility -- all while eliminating the need to increase bandwidth, storage or servers.

The company recently announced partnership with Microsoft (News - Alert) to help customers virtualize their branch offices to deliver LAN-like application performance while corporate network is protected from Web security threats, TMCnet reported.