Banks are rapidly expanding their businesses nationwide and globally, yet they are coming under increasing pressure to provide greater protection to their customers' sensitive financial data.

As a result, many banks are looking to consolidate their IT infrastructure to better meet these demands. While the consolidation of branch office servers and complete data centers certainly helps data protection and even eases regulatory compliance, it can negatively affect the performance of applications for users in branch locations.

Riverbed can accelerate the performance all of the common banking applications that run over TCP, and dramatically reduce bandwidth utilization. This often includes bulk transactional data, consumer information, trading information, financial models, as well as back office applications such as backup via the network or data center replication. The flexibility of the Riverbed solution means that any bank with multiple offices can greatly simplify their IT footprint while more effectively protecting consumer data.

A global bank solves the lost data problem

One of the top ten banks in the world was facing several serious IT challenges as it continued to expand its operations globally.

Their number one concern was securing the bank's confidential customer and operational data. Their tape-based server backup in thousands of bank branches had led to several severe and embarrassing losses of confidential data in 2004 and 2005.

At the same time, IT wanted to implement simpler, standard operating environments that could guarantee application performance, eliminate the need for regional data centers, and even provide an enhanced disaster recovery strategy.

The bank was able to achieve all of these objectives with Riverbed's WDS solutions. Remote tape backup systems were consolidated with no performance loss or congestion of the WAN. Building additional global data centers was avoided, and users now see faster application performance.