Business with Multiple Locations Seek to Unify IT Services
Author: Scott Davidson
May 2007
Businesses expect their remote location to contribute to the bottom line rather than pump up expenses. But most estimates peg that remote locations consume as much as a third of corporate IT budgets, and that’s whether the business model consists of branch offices, retail outlets, remote properties or distributed facilities
With today’s constant pressures to tighten IT budgets, the need for more efficient and secure remote location operations has never been higher. Deploying the most productive technologies now available for managing operational costs across multiple sites can be a crucial factor in maintaining profitability. Hence, discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of centralized and decentralized approaches used for managing distributed operations can help us to understand why a solution that eliminates the customary problems of remote office information systems might warrant our attention.
One of the most common problems companies face is slow network connections between the corporate network and the remote computer servers at their remote location. In addition, a careful review of remote office operations will likely reveal risks involving data security and network bandwidth availability that affects everyone’s productivity.
In addition, data in remote locations often has minimal protection and the limited or non-existent local IT staff may be overwhelmed responding to network failures or security breaches within their remote location systems. Remote locations typically stand last in line for upgrading or replacing computer servers and software.
When evaluating their remote locations’ technology requirements, each company must assess whether they should centralize systems or maintain independent, remote solutions. Each approach presents its own unique challenges.
For example, organizations that operate large numbers of sites typically face fundamental tradeoffs when considering centralization. While centralized systems may reduce the costs of network management, productivity might be lost due to bandwidth constraints and the delays inherent in running IT operations over a wide area network (WAN).
A decentralized model maintains productivity and remote location autonomy, but it usually increases management costs. Decentralized IT operations may also require the expense of sending personnel from headquarters to local sites for upgrades and maintenance. In addition, decentralization can burden the local staff with unfamiliar IT operational tasks that distracts and takes time away from their primary jobs.
Another area of concern confronting branch locations is the replication of data with the central office. Most remote offices connect to applications from a data center or service provider. But if a regularly used application is down, an entire location can lose productivity. As a result, remote locations are forced frequently into managing enterprise data in isolation.
Remote data protection typically requires expensive hardware and software coupled with difficult data recovery models. The common tools used for remote access monitoring and maintenance are often inefficient and do not provide a centralized view of all the remote locations and their underlying services. These tools provide limited functionality for remotely restoring services or recovering office data if a remote server fails.
New remote office server solutions address the problems commonly associated with centralized vs. decentralized solutions tradeoffs. By utilizing software server technology designed for the specific needs of companies with multiple sites, business can retain the performance, availability and productivity benefits of a centralized IT environment while avoiding issues such as limited connectivity and management overhead. These solutions which have only recently been introduced to the marketplace are usually referred to as remote office server systems or remote location solutions.
The best of these solution sets can maintain remote office data while avoiding costly service and connectivity issues by simplifying the management of the IT infrastructure, eliminating core inefficiencies and reducing the cost to operate remote offices. For example, some solutions may be capable of reducing network traffic by up to 70 percent and improving transfer speeds by automating certain technical processes, known as caching, compression, and traffic prioritization by IT types. With remote office solutions, a company can manage all software updates throughout the remote sites from one central location. In addition, the technology of remote office solutions provides the automation and centralization of core functions, resulting in significantly fewer help desk requests from end users.
While cost reduction is an attractive benefit for any technology, remote solutions are attractive for other reasons as well. For certain businesses, enhancements in security and data protection through improved connectivity protection and centralized backups that can replace less reliable branch data defense methods, may be among the most appealing benefits. However, of interest to almost any organization operating in a geographically dispersed environment, contemporary remote office solutions can also improve information worker productivity by providing undisrupted, high speed access to the most up-to-date resources, enhancing remote office integration with the central organization.
At an elemental level, selecting the right remote office solutions makes managing the distributed organization a lot easier and reduces costs. These systems empower managers to maintain the performance, availability, and productivity benefits of their local remote office servers while reducing management overhead and are indicative of the specialized solutions designed for specific business scenarios that are available today.
About the Author: Scott Davidson is the Heartland Area General Manager for Microsoft’s Small and Mid-market Solutions and Partners (SMS&P) group, which consists of Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.
