Global professional services company GHD deployed Riverbed SteelConnect – an app-defined SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) solution.
GHD has a complex IT landscape which spans more than 10 countries, 8,500 employees, leverages 3,000 business and technical applications, and includes GHD’s own private cloud.
In 2014, GHD merged with North American engineering consultancy Conestoga-Rovers & Associates (CRA), which included the addition of more than 3000 employees in over 100 offices, including 50 small sites.
Elizabeth Harper, the Chief Information Officer of GHD, was tasked with integrating all the new offices and their IT systems into the wider GHD business.
Some of the new sites were geographically dispersed across the US and Canada, designed to be as close to their clients as possible. At the same time, the new offices needed instant access and connectivity to the GHD network globally so employees can collaborate in real time.
Using SteelConnect, GHD dramatically reduced the cost of network design and deployment, and was able to connect all 50 of the smaller offices in four weeks. Harper estimates that if GHD had chosen a traditional networking approach, the project would have taken at least three months to complete.
“We did a really thorough assessment of the options in the market and what we found with SteelConnect was a very low, almost zero-touch deployment, said Elizabeth Harper, CIO, GHD.
“SteelConnect allows us to preconfigure a device using a cloud portal before delivering it to the physical site. This means that a non-IT person at the small office can follow simple instructions, plug the device in and have everything up and running in minutes instead of days or weeks.”
GHD plans to expand the deployment to traditional and larger offices, and estimates SteelConnect will save the business roughly $1 Million (USD) a year.
In addition to SteelConnect, GHD has deployed the complete Riverbed Application Performance Platform across its organization in order to enable collaboration between project teams spread across the globe:
Riverbed SteelHead to optimize network traffic and accelerate delivery and peak performance of applications, regardless of employee location
Riverbed SteelCentral to ensure visibility across applications, networks and end-users, and the ability to identify and resolve issues quickly so that GHD can continue to achieve great performance
Riverbed SteelFusion to simplify and secure the management of server, storage and backup infrastructure in their remote offices
The company also announced major updates to its SD-WAN offering SteelConnect. As part of today’s announcement, SteelConnect now supports complex enterprise environments and simplifies the implementation of large-scale SD-WAN deployments in the data center with non-disruptive network integration.
