OREANDA-NEWS. February 11, 2016. Riverbed Technology, the leader in application performance infrastructure, today announced that independent Australian charity, Cancer Council NSW, deployed Riverbed® SteelHead™ across multiple sites to strengthen and enhance application performance solutions for their regional workforce. This is the first phase of a wider digital transformation project which will see the charity rebuild its underlying network architecture and adopt a cloud-first, mobile-device-only strategy so that staff and volunteers have greater capacity and flexibility to serve the NSW community.

Cancer Council NSW is 97% community funded and works with volunteers, supporters, stakeholders and staff to reduce the impact of cancer through a combination of research, prevention, support and advocacy programs. The charity currently employs over 350 staff and is supported by approximately 2,300 regular volunteers. 

The organization’s 16 regional offices and eight retail stores play a pivotal role in ensuring local services and programs are tailored to match the needs of people in local communities. These offices, however, were working from older IT solutions and infrastructure, which left volunteers and staff unable to access the applications and databases critical to doing their work, and made team collaboration slower.

Branko Ceran, CIO at Cancer Council NSW, said a build-up of legacy systems needed to be updated with more current IT solutions, to ensure staff and volunteers could really focus their resources on getting information to the community. “Our regional offices can work up to seven days a week and, because of older network services, staff and volunteers weren’t getting the best IT resources to be as efficient as possible in their roles, which was impacting their ability to deliver information and resources to thousands of people across NSW,” Ceran said.

The Riverbed SteelHead appliances were first implemented across regional offices, then at Sydney head office. The entire deployment took just one month.

“With the introduction of SteelHead, staff and volunteers can stay focused on the work that matters – like beating cancer. Staff are more efficient, and have more time to focus on delivering our programs, events and services directly to the community,” said Ceran. “That impact alone has been incredible for our regional sites, and provided them with a suite of new resources, freeing up time that would have previously seen them spend longer in the office.”

With the foundation of their IT transformation in place, the next phase will be to replace legacy desktop PCs with mobile devices and notebooks. This will enable staff to work on the road with the same capabilities and performance as if they were in the office. The key to this mobile workforce vision will be the simultaneous rollout of a cloud-first strategy which will include Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint, Skype for Business as well as the migration of legacy systems to the cloud, with Riverbed SteelHead SaaS accelerating the migration and ensuring ongoing high performance of SaaS apps.    

Ceran is also evaluating Riverbed®, SteelCentral™ application performance management solutions to improve troubleshooting, and Riverbed® SteelFusion™, the first and only hyper-converged infrastructure solution which consolidates 100% of data and servers from remote sites into data centers to centralize security and management without losing the performance benefits of running remote services locally.

Ian Raper, Regional Vice President, Riverbed, Australia and New Zealand, said Cancer Council NSW’s transformation project meant its staff and its army of volunteers can now focus on their critical role in the community, rather than being slowed down by technical constraints. “The concept of digital transformation is sweeping through organizations of every size in every industry and Cancer Council NSW is leading the charity sector’s adoption of these new technologies,” Raper said. “In the same way that you can’t build a house without a foundation, you can’t adopt today’s disruptive technologies without a network capable of handling the complexities of on-demand, anywhere access.”

Riverbed SteelHead and the Riverbed Application Performance Platform™

The Riverbed Application Performance Platform™ gives CIOs end-to-end visibility, optimization and control across an entire enterprise. A key part of the platform, Riverbed SteelHead is the industry’s #1 optimization solution for accelerated delivery of all applications across the hybrid enterprise. SteelHead provides increased visibility into application performance and end-user experience and the ability to ensure business performance SLAs through an application-aware approach to hybrid networking based on centralized business intent-based policies.