Case Study: Medi-Clinic Southern Africa achieves 80% faster file downloads and avoids costly bandwidth upgrade with Riverbed

Healthcare company selects Riverbed to improve employee productivity and avoid costly bandwidth upgrade

Medi-Clinic Southern Africa, part of a major private hospital group with around 13,000 employees and 50+ sites, centralized critical IT systems to a private cloud and began seeing severe WAN performance problems. Staff outside the head office struggled to access intranet, clinical and admin applications, and the team estimated that fixing performance by increasing bandwidth would cost roughly ZAR 5,000,000 (≈US$660k) per year.

Medi-Clinic deployed 58 Riverbed SteelHead appliances managed by the Central Management Console, which delivered rapid, visible improvements in user experience. The rollout boosted bandwidth utilization 3x, cut many file download times by about 80%, reduced nightly DB2 updates from 7–8 hours to under one hour, recovered the capital investment within 11 months, and avoided the costly bandwidth upgrade—dramatically improving employee productivity and satisfaction.

Medi-Clinic Southern Africa

Deon Myburgh

Group ICT Operations Manager