Rapid Technologies announced today that LegalWise has purchased and deployed Riverbed`s Steelhead appliances across South Africa to improve the performance of centralised applications.
LegalWise is the trading name for Legal Expenses Insurance Southern Africa (LEZA). Established in 1984, LegalWise pioneered the concept of legal expenses insurance in South Africa, a concept endorsed by the association of Law Societies of South Africa and the Black Lawyers Association.
LegalWise is a registered short-term insurer, with 26 online branches across South Africa (many of these in remote areas). Its main requirement is providing access to a large centralised database of its clients through a Web-based front-end, as well as catering for branch e-mail serviced by a centralised mail server.
As the number of remote users per branch grew, the increased data load caused bandwidth to become a constraint for LegalWise. The alternative was an upgrade of all network infrastructures (mainly 64K diginet) in order to overcome these networking challenges.
However, just upgrading bandwidth would not address the performance of the applications. Based on this, LegalWise decided to test the Riverbed Technology, and with performance enhancements of over 72%, prompted the roll-out.
"We had planned to upgrade our inter-branch bandwidth, which translates into ongoing monthly expenditure. By converting 11 months of extra bandwidth rental into upfront capital expenditure on Steelhead appliances, we are getting approximately four times the throughput that we would have achieved," said Digby Prior, LegalWise Group IT Manager.
LegalWise has purchased 25 devices and a data centre. The roll-out of the devices was done in conjunction with Rapid Technologies.
"The Riverbed Technology is a plug-and-play technology with an auto discovery feature, this enables smooth roll-outs when installing across many geographic sites," explained Gary Coetzee, MD of Rapid Technologies. "This reduces the reliance on the network personnel to configure individual devices, as the Riverbed Central Management Console is able to 'see` the new device as it is plugged into the network."
The links are running at over 70% optimisation. This offers LegalWise a delay in any network upgrades for a number of years.
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