Banks, brokerage firms and other financial institutions are often built on networks of hundreds or even thousands of remote branches. Today most of those branch offices store critical customer financial data. Branches have at least one server, local storage, and almost certainly a local tape-backup system. Oftentimes branch IT needs are served through outsourced contractors. Unfortunately, that network and service architecture was not built for today's environment.

Newspapers today frequently detail stories of lost financial data and stolen identities. Disasters may lead to destruction of key information. Federal compliance has also required a much tighter hold on consumer data. Given the dramatic change in IT requirements for financial institutions, it is imperative that IT managers consolidate data storage and backup for remote offices. Additionally they must ensure that a minimal number of contractors have access to private bank systems, while still providing high performance and service to distributed employees. Finally, the IT budget is not growing proportionally to these requests.

Riverbed's WDS solutions can help large and small financial institutions centralize distributed servers and backup systems, so that data storage can be unified and infrastructure can be simplified. Users can access data and applications with LAN-like speed, and data backup operations can be performed in minutes instead of hours. Tape backup operations can be consolidated to the central data center, and distributed infrastructure can be eliminated. With Riverbed, IT managers can more easily ensure compliance with the long list of laws and regulations they face while at the same time reducing the costs of remote IT management.