Case Study: Allied North America achieves 80–95% bandwidth reduction and serverless branch offices with Riverbed SteelHead

Steelhead® Appliances Reduce Bandwidth Consumption while Eliminating File and Exchange Servers from Branch Offices

Allied North America is a fast-growing specialty insurance broker with 14 U.S. offices and roughly two million documents. Rapid acquisitions left the company with local file and Exchange servers in many branches and poor performance over shared T1 links, making remote file access slow and driving up IT administration; the CIO’s goal was to eliminate branch servers without adding bandwidth.

Allied deployed Riverbed SteelHead appliances to optimize WAN traffic and pre‑position key content, allowing removal of most file and Exchange servers from branches. The result was an immediate 80–95% reduction in bandwidth consumption (5x–20x effective improvement), faster local response for brokers, simplified backup and management, quicker recovery, and a strong ROI—SteelHead is now standard equipment for new branches.

Allied North America

Geoffrey Moon

CIO, Allied North America