The Peace Corps is a U.S. federal government agency dedicated to world peace and friendship, established in 1961. Approximately 3,500 staff members and 7,000 volunteers serve in 74 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Their projects include local education, agriculture, health, business development, information technology, HIV/AIDS prevention and care, and food security. 
Previously, low-bandwidth satellite and wired network connections prevented volunteers from collaborating with their peers in other locations and headquarters personnel. The majority of sites had 512Kbps downstream and 256Kbps upstream bandwidth. Each site had its own Microsoft SharePoint portal, but it was only available to volunteers in the same office. Access to centralized applications for project tracking, safety and security reporting, and bill paying were painfully slow. Transferring an injured volunteers x-ray could take hourstime that a staff member could be spending on projects that improve villagers lives. Whats more, volunteers in different countries, and even different posts in the same country, could not share files. This meant that they might need to begin a business development or health project from scratch instead of benefiting from others experience.
Goals
The main goal of the Peace Corps project was to create a global unified network that would enable collaboration among volunteers, helping them to increase quality of life for people in their villages. A secondary goal was to save time for Peace Corps IT staff by making it faster for them to perform daily activities. This would free them up for innovative IT projects that would help volunteers be effective. The third goal was to improve quality of life for volunteers by enabling them to make phone calls to their family and potential employers from the post. Finding a phone in remote areas is very difficult, and calls can cost US$10 a minute or more. By optimizing the WAN, the Peace Corps would free up enough bandwidth for voice over IP.
How it Changes Peoples Lives
The new global unified network takes advantage of Cisco Wide-Area Application Services (WAAS) to make it up to 20 faster for volunteers and staff to use centralized applications and share files. So far, the Peace Corps IT department has optimized the following applications and services:

	Microsoft Active Directory
	A volunteer management application, including project tracking
	A safety and security reporting application
	Financial services, including bill paying
	A global Microsoft SharePoint portal for sharing ideas and lessons learned (successfully tested but not yet implemented)
The optimized WAN makes it much easier for volunteers to share information that helps them improve quality of life for people in their villages. Cisco WAAS has also improved quality of life for the volunteers. Reducing the bandwidth that data applications consume has freed up bandwidth for voice over IP. Now volunteers can now make phone calls over the WAN, at no cost, helping them to stay in touch with family and talk with prospective employers when their service term is ending. 
Finally, with quicker file downloads, Cisco WAAS saves time for Peace Corps staff members.

The Peace Corps does not have the budget to bring high-speed links to its posts. And even if it did, the latency for traffic traveling the thousands of miles between remote posts and Washington DC headquarters would slow application performance. Therefore, the agency needed technology that would optimize existing WAN bandwidth and provide LAN-like performance. 

Cisco WAAS has reduced overall bandwidth utilization by 50 percent. This has enabled the the Peace Corps to adopt voice over IP and will soon enable it to deploy the global Microsoft SharePoint portal. Cisco WAAS also accelerates application performanceup to 20 times for file sharing. 

Unlike any other WAN optimization solution that the Peace Corps evaluated, Cisco WAAS does not curtail network access if it goes down or is taken down for routine maintenance. Peace Corps volunteers and staff can continue to use the network, just without WAN optimization and application acceleration. 

Yes

Yes

There are many benefits to the new worldwide IT networking infrastructure.  Volunteers are empowered to do their jobs better because they can share information with other volunteers, ultimately benefitting the villagers.  International posts no longer operate as IT islands, and the Peace Corps has become a more unified, collaborative environment. 

The optimized WAN makes it much easier for volunteers to share information that helps them improve quality of life for people in their villages. Cisco WAAS has also improved quality of life for the volunteers. Reducing the bandwidth that data applications consume has freed up bandwidth for voice over IP. Now volunteers can now make phone calls over the WAN, at no cost, helping them to stay in touch with family and talk with prospective employers when their service term is ending. 
Finally, with quicker file downloads that reduce download time from two hours to 15 minutes, Cisco WAAS saves time for Peace Corps staff members.

The optimized WAN allows volunteers to more easily share information aroudn the world.  For example, an IT Specialist in Mexico is collaborating with another IT Specialist in Ecuador on similar projects. "I can get my documents anytime and anywhere I need them, says Andres Jaime, [IT Specialist], Peace Corps. Sharing files between my post and headquarters has never been easier because we no longer have a 5MB limit for email."

The new infrastructure also saves considerable time and improves efficience for Peace Corps. volunteers staff members.  According to Luis Ly, a Peace Corps IT specialist in Peru, Cisco WAAS has made a big difference in productivity.  "Microsoft Active Directory and all of our web-based services are much faster. Recently, I downloaded a 345 MB file in 15 minutes, which would have taken two hours without the Cisco WAAS solution. And I no longer have to start over if the Internet connection goes down." 

Finally, Peace Corps. staff members have a more reliable, cost-effective phone service with IP telephony.  They are more easily able to communicate with other volunteers around the world, and can keep in touch  with family and friends during their service term.  Voice quality is better than it was before, even though voice traffic is encrypted, says Domenico Palombo, chief of global network operations, Peace Corps. 

The Peace Corps global network is the worlds largest belonging to a government agency to take advantage of WAN optimization technology on very low bandwidth connections. While certain other federal agencies, such as the State Department, have as many global locations, they can afford 1.5MB satellite connections in remote areas. They Peace Corps cannot. "The Peace Corps has to make the most of 256KB and 512KB connections, and Cisco WAAS solution has enabled us to do that," says Palombo.

The return on investment from the global unified network project is high. Many global Peace Corps sites would not have been able to support the new global environment without more bandwidth. "If we were to actually buy additional bandwidth instead of optimizing, we would have had to pay an average of U$970 monthly per site, or US$11,640 annually," says Palombo.  That compares to a one time cost of US$6,175 per site for Cisco WAAS.   

As of March 2009, Peace Corps had deployed 26 WAAS devices, at a total cost of US$192,465.  "Buying enough bandwidth across the [Americas] region to support collaboration would have cost US$302,6400 annually," says Palombo. "Our return on investment from Cisco WAAS was US$185,315 in the first year alone. Projected savings by the end of 2011, when all 26 sites will be deployed, will be US$642,610."

This dramatic ROI for the project achieves the current administration's dictate to more effectively and efficiently run government programs with the aid of leading-edge technology.

Furthermore, even if Peace Corps had spent the money to upgrade bandwidth, the Microsoft SharePoint portal would have been painfully slow because of the round-trip latency, which has a bigger impact on application response time than bandwidth increase. Cisco WAAS mitigated latency at the same time it increased available bandwidth.

The small price we pay at each site for a Cisco ISR with a WAAS module provides an enormous return on investment, Palombo concludes. It enables us to get a team online in the middle of Paraguay or Lesotho, for example, which simply was not possible in the past.

The biggest challenge to  implementing a global unified network was lack of bandwidth. The Peace Corps simply did not have the  budget to bring direct connections to its global posts. 

Training could have been an obstacle, but was not. Although the Peace Corps has an IT specialist in every country, sending that individual to every office in the country would have been time consuming and costly. No training was needed because Cisco WAAS does not change the user experience. Volunteers and staffers connect to the network the same way they used to, Palombo says. The optimization and application acceleration happens without their doing anything. Theres almost no administrative burden.

Peace Corps leadership wanted to know the costs, whether it was necessary, and whether it would work. The costs for WAN optimization and application acceleration were far lower than other approaches. Managers recognized that network access and collaboration were necessary for the mission. As to whether it would work, the Peace Corps had to rely on the experience of other organizations, and extensive testing in its in house test lab.

Exceeded

The Peace Corps plans to use the same investment in Cisco WAAS to accelerate other applications. One plan is to optimize each posts Internet connection. This will have the effect of accelerating all web-based applications that the Peace Corps uses, including Cisco WebEx.

The Peace Corps also plans to deploy Cisco Unified Communications, now possible because Cisco WAAS freed up the needed bandwidth. This will enable even greater collaboration because volunteers and staff will be able to communicate with voice, video, and web collaboration.

As of March 2009, the project was fully operational in 25 of the Peace Corps 70 main posts, in Mexico, Thailand, Moldova, Senegal, Lesotho, and Paraguay. By the end of 2010, Cisco WAAS will be deployed in approximately 70 countries.

Volunteers and staff embraced the global unified network immediately. They don't have to do anything differently in order to benefit from greatly accelerated application performance. They log into the network as they always have. The difference is that they can access more types of information, faster.