Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection Improves Bandwidth Utilization 71%

Introduction:

Customs and Border Protection (CPB) is the unified border agency within the Department of Homeland Security charged with the management, control, and protection of U.S. borders. CBP is focused on keeping terrorists and terrorist weapons out of the country while enforcing hundreds of U.S. laws.

ThunderCat Technology is helping CBP transform to a more efficient network after a $20+ million dollar award for WAN Optimization/Acceleration solutions from Riverbed Technology. CPB is saving millions of dollars by avoiding bandwidth upgrades while time accelerating and increasing application performance to support CBP’s mission.

Challenge

CBP’s mission of guarding the nation’s borders, safeguarding the American homeland, and enforcing the laws of the United States requires the distributed deployment of mission-critical IT systems. The CBP network support environment provides engineering support for over 1,000 offices and supports secure connectivity to over 1,000 additional government locations worldwide.

CBP therefore has a large WAN circuit investment cost, and it continues to invest in WAN bandwidth to support its mission. However, many CBP sites have relatively low-bandwidth connections, impeding their ability to effectively leverage mission-critical applications running over the network.

Managing expenses is a major concern for every government organizations, and CBP sought a WAN optimization solution that could leverage an integrated approach to application performance by accelerating applications and optimizing bandwidth—while at the same time avoiding costly bandwidth investments.

Solution

ThunderCat was experienced in working closely with CBP to address data storage, disaster recovery, and other network-related initiatives. In addition, ThunderCat had built a core expertise around WAN optimization and has a partnership with Riverbed^®.

Riverbed offers comprehensive IT performance optimization solutions that let customers drive an order-of-magnitude improvement on existing IT resources. Riverbed architects its products to fit into customer environments with minimal integration, and Riverbed WAN optimization solutions deliver immediate cost savings and productivity gains.

ThunderCat has developed a core professional services expertise around WAN optimization to help clients accelerate business operations while controlling IT costs, and it gives agencies the ability to leverage their IT infrastructure in order to reduce bandwidth costs, increase data service performance, and accelerate backup and replication performance. ThunderCat assists agencies in overcoming the challenges associated with poor application performance and congested or insufficient bandwidth, and helps agencies implement IT consolidation, support mobile users, and implement data backup and replication.

ThunderCat proposed over 100 Riverbed Steelhead^® appliances for the first 64 CBP sites. Steelhead appliances provide a robust, easy-to-use WAN optimization capability to remote offices offices and data centers. With Steelhead appliances, organizations can cut bandwidth usage by 60-95%, accelerate applications by up to 100x, and enable disaster recovery operations within ever-shrinking recovery windows.

This initial deployment included 50 U.S. locations and 14 international sites. Application traffic targeted for optimization included email, Internet, CIFS, anti-virus, and other CBP enterprise applications.

Benefits

CBP realized major results immediately after the initial deployment of the Steelhead appliances. Riverbed Steelhead appliances provide the highest level of WAN performance across the broadest range of applications. Available in a wide range of models – all powered by the Riverbed Optimization System (RiOS^®) – Steelhead appliances are also the most scalable approach to WAN optimization.

CBP realized a 91% reduction in MAPI traffic, an 81% reduction in FTP traffic, a 74% reduction in CIFS traffic, and a 68% reduction in HTTP traffic carried over the WAN. In total, CBP recognized a 71% improvement in bandwidth utilization, and ThunderCat and Riverbed are now actively deploying Steelhead appliances devices at the additional CBP locations.

ThunderCat and Riverbed were able to re-provision and optimize CBP network locations without CBP having to procure additional costly bandwidth. CBP is building a future technology architecture that supports and increases the effectiveness of the overall CBP mission. The combination of ThunderCat professional services and Riverbed WAN optimization technology allows the U.S. Homeland Security to cost-effectively deliver critical applications to help secure U.S borders and protect the American homeland.

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