Tearfund, a British Christian relief and development agency working with those in poverty in many of the poorest countries around the world, needed to ensure that their remote aid workers have secure and reliable access to applications and data.

The organization works in 60 countries in the developing world, through 300 indigenous, church- based organizations and supports over 1,000 front-line staff responding to natural and man-made disasters.

But given their personnel's limited access to applications due to high latency and packet loss over satellite networks, bandwidth capacity was becoming an increasing concern. Overseas programs were individually responsible for purchasing satellite bandwidth, but "the cost and quality of service were inconsistent and hampering productivity." 

In some cases establishing a VPN to the London network was not even possible.

Following an evaluation with Expand Networks (News - Alert) and Riverbed, Tearfund chose Expand Networks to support a VPN and accelerate traffic "even on very poor links," according to Expand officials.

Implemented first with Tearfund teams in central Asia, the most problematic region, the integrated WAN optimization technology within Expand's platform "enabled Tearfund to immediately compress and accelerate traffic across the satellite links."

Expand has been deployed in six of Tearfund's global locations. With regional hub sites finding improvements in network throughput, "plans are also being made to deploy Expand to optimize satellite links at Tearfund's field sites across the globe."

Tim Clarke, IT Director, Tearfund, said with Expand in place "we are able to run applications in the field from servers in London. Productivity can be directly linked to application performance, and with Expand we have a solution that is enabling our workforce to remain efficient."

Tearfund has decided to roll out a new finance and logistic package across the organization with the support of Expand as well. "The new applications run on Terminal Servers in the UK," Clarke says, adding that "we were initially doubtful that this would be feasible. Our fallback plan was to install servers at each of our overseas offices despite the cost and difficulty of supporting and synchronizing servers in remote locations."