Branch Office Optimization
1/31/2007
By Heidi Biggar, Brian Garrett and John McKnight
Delivering IT services to remote offices/branch offices (ROBOs) over a wide area network is too often slow, expensive, and complex. What’s more, in an era in which sound data protection processes are essential for business, legal, and regulatory compliance purposes, information assets at remote locations are often inadequately protected, exposing remote locations to lost data and productivity and exposing parent organizations to high degrees of risk.

With IT staff at remote locations already in short supply, users and vendors alike have realized there is a clear need for new technologies that can improve remote locations’ access to IT resources as well as their data protection procedures. In recent years, vendors in the networking, storage, systems, and application software markets have all introduced new technologies – known by terms such as such as WAN optimization, WAN acceleration, Wide Area File Services (WAFS), remote backup, and data de-duplication, among others – that optimize existing IT resources and processes for access from or delivery to remote locations. ESG collectively calls these new technologies that improve remote IT service delivery and remote data protection “Branch Office Optimization.”

Against this backdrop of an emerging, dynamic, and often-confusing market, this report will provide readers with a comprehensive picture of the IT priorities at and challenges currently faced by remote office/branch office locations, and how exactly organizations plan to address those challenges both from a technology and process perspective. Specifically, this report answers questions such as:

• What are organizations' most important IT priorities for their remote office/branch office locations?
• Which applications and IT services are in use at remote locations, and which of these are viewed as most critical to the business?
• How are corporate applications and IT services currently accessed by remote locations? Are applications hosted on site or are they hosted at a centralized data center and accessed over the WAN?
• For those applications that are hosted centrally and accessed by remote locations, what are the problems associated with delivering IT services to remote locations over the WAN?
• How do users plan on addressing these problems? Have new technologies such as WAFS and WAN optimization been deployed to ensure adequate performance for remote applications and users? If so, what benefits have these solutions provided to date?
• What is the current backup process at remote offices?
• Are organizations using any remote backup technologies whereby data is backed up directly to centralized locations over the WAN?
• For users that are using remote backup, what led them to do so? Are they experiencing any challenges backing up data over the WAN?
• For users that back up locally today, are they interested in moving to a remote backup model? If so, why? If not, why not?

To help answer these questions, ESG conducted quantitative and qualitative primary research with IT professionals at 626 North American public & private sector organizations. ESG interviewed respondents from both remote office and headquarters locations, so as to better understand the perspectives and attitudes of the different constituents involved in making remote office IT decisions.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.


View Executive Summary
+ Buy Now