Companies are struggling to support remote office and branch office (ROBO) IT, with delays in provisioning applications, disaster recovery and managing data backups ranking as the biggest challenges.
This is according to a Riverbed Technology survey, which questioned 183 attendees at the EMC World event in Las Vegas.
The study says supporting remote offices and branch offices is tough for IT, as it is expensive, resource-intensive and opens up businesses to security and disaster-related risks.
ROBO provisioning delays (of things like ROBO infrastructure, applications and services) are expensive to businesses as they delay the organisation's ability to generate revenue, it adds.
Delays when recovering from ROBO outages also hurt the business' ability to generate revenue, exposes the ROBO to risk from data loss and can tarnish the company's reputation, says the survey.
Wimpie van Rensburg, country manager for Sub-Saharan Africa at Riverbed, says IT at the edge continues to be provisioned and managed largely as it has been for the past 20 years, with distributed IT spread out across potentially hundreds of remote and branch locations.
"However, this approach can bring data risk and operational penalties to companies at an extremely high cost, and in today's increasingly distributed enterprise with a primary focus on data and security, past approaches may not be ideal for business success."
Supporting branch offices is now a costly, time-consuming job - although it's one of the IT department's many duties, there's usually no one on-site to do it, says IDG Research.
These days, companies with branch sites find themselves confronting new demands, from juggling cloud-based and locally-hosted applications to delivering virtual desktops and applications over long distances without compromising responsiveness, it says.
Those are tasks few legacy IT solutions are equipped to perform and the lack of onsite expertise can be very challenging, adds IDG Research.
Also, complex remote infrastructures, sluggish application performance and increased security risks are recurrent concerns, it says.
"The new Riverbed survey shows companies are really struggling to effectively and efficiently manage their IT operations at the edge," says Paul O'Farrell, senior vice-president and general manager of SteelHead, SteelFusion and SteelConnect at Riverbed.
As companies continue to move more of their operations to remote locations, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage their backup and recovery processes and provide adequate IT staff onsite at each individual location, adds O'Farrell.
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