That's the scope of financial services leader Edward Jones' operations. Given the speed of the global economy, maintaining the company's focus on individual service across its entire network of offices demands fast connectivity solutions.

In 2007, Edward Jones retired its 20-plus-year-old satellite system and teamed with AT&T to create the Global Branch Network to deliver voice communications, always-on Internet access and critical market data.

"The satellite system was no longer able to serve our growing branch network," said Vinny Ferrari, chief information officer for Edward Jones. "We worked with AT&T to design a technology upgrade that gives us the bandwidth we needed to ensure that our employees have access to applications and to complement our trademark face-to-face customer service."

AT&T provides a global Virtual Private Network (VPN) service that offers a single secure network to connect numerous business locations, such as branch offices, headquarters and remote users. The results for Edward Jones? Increased reliability, faster traffic flow, easier management and the ability to expand quickly.

"We worked closely with Edward Jones to deploy a network that is robust, resilient and redundant to support the 'always-available' nature of its business," said AT&T's José Gutiérrez, executive vice president of Enterprise Business Sales. "We give them an infrastructure that's adaptable and expandable enough to meet their needs as their business grows."