With the average enterprise operating 55 branch offices, organisations are spending more than $4 billion annually on remote IT.
That's according to Brent Lees, senior product marketing manager for EMEA at Riverbed Technology, citing a recent IDC study. He points out that enterprises are always looking to take their business to the next level, and one of the most effective ways to grow is to open new branch offices.
Lees is of the view that the ability to have remote offices in several locations delivers a range of benefits, including access to a wide network of professional talent and potential customers. "A global presence is key in today's international marketplace, with customers ordering goods from around the world and at the same time expecting a seamless user experience," he says.
He believes that to make branch offices as effective as possible, workers need to have quick access to all the business information they need to perform their job.
"Traditionally, this has been achieved by providing and maintaining technology locally. However, costs can start to add up and spiral out of control when you look at the price of servers and storage, backups and the IT staff managing hardware and software. Worse, when disaster strikes, recovery of branch data and applications can take days, putting the branch at risk," he says.
With so much at stake, Lees explains, it no longer makes sense for today's organisations to rely on traditional methods of technology deployment and management.
He points out that when each branch operates and maintains its own equipment and data storage, the result is islands of technology that are rarely updated and patched at the same rate. The outcome is constant management churn and increased risk that a disaster at any one of these locations can significantly impact the business.
"To illustrate this point, imagine a business with 25 offices across the globe. Its success comes from its successful growth, but this growth has come at a price. Due to rapid expansion, the company is operating small data centres in each office location to service branch users. While these data centres were developed with performance in mind, data centre sprawl can lead to operational inefficiency, leaving critical data and applications vulnerable," Lees explains.
He notes that businesses like this are turning to convergence technologies that allow them to consolidate servers, storage and network infrastructure into a single appliance. This approach greatly simplifies the maintenance and delivery of critical resources, and - importantly - maintains the application performance level, so user experience is not compromised, he adds.
According to Lees, what works in a single data centre can also be scaled to a global organisation, simplifying and consolidating resources, even when multiple locations are involved. "This is known as branch converged infrastructure. With branch converged infrastructure, compute no longer needs to be tied to the underlying storage. As a result, applications run locally in a stateless mode, reducing the infrastructure that is needed in the branch office and keeping data in a safer, more closely monitored location."
For Lees, a converged branch infrastructure offers several benefits. It provides businesses with a virtualisation platform that runs necessary local workloads such as file and domain controllers, as well as any business application or custom workload needed at a given site - without using racks of dedicated infrastructure for applications, storage and backup, he says.
The result is a smaller branch footprint that still provides users with the resources they need locally, Lees concludes.
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