Survey Reveals Common IT Challenges to Supporting Remote Locations

The central office has long been the center of gravity for most business IT organizations. That’s where the data center is, and where most of IT’s staff works. But those personnel and systems are increasingly asked to support users at remote and branch offices (ROBOs). These locations are crucial because that’s often where business happens. That’s creating difficulties for IT professionals who are discovering that supporting ROBOs is expensive, resource-intensive and increases risk of data theft or loss.

Those are the key findings of the 2016 Riverbed Remote Office/Branch Office IT Survey. To better understand how businesses are grappling with these ROBO IT issues, Riverbed commissioned a survey of 183 attendees on the show floor during EMC (News - Alert) World 2016 in Las Vegas. They represented SMBs and large organizations. Most (82 percent) worked in IT, while 9 percent worked in development. 

As you might expect, the data center is the primary focus of most respondents’ attentions, but ROBOs ranked second in importance to IT. This makes sense when you consider the “three 50s”:

1. Almost 50 percent of all employees work in branch or remote offices
2. Fifty percent of companies’ data is stored outside the data center
3. Branch and remote offices represent roughly 50 percent of IT’s budget

The moniker “ROBO” encompasses a wide range of facilities – everything from the local branch office of a multinational law firm, to a factory, to a ship at sea. But they all have one thing in common: the critical role they play in growing revenues and driving business growth.  

Yet, organizations rarely staff ROBOs with trained IT personnel, forcing IT to remotely perform monitoring, maintenance and troubleshooting. This makes deploying and maintaining systems and applications for each ROBO complex, expensive and time-consuming, particularly with today’s hybrid IT architectures.

The majority of EMC World attendees we surveyed echoed those concerns. Their top challenges include:

• Disaster recovery: 54 percent cited delays when recovering from ROBO outages as their top issue. These delays hurt the business’ ability to generate revenue, exposes the ROBO to risk from data loss and can tarnish the business’ reputation.
• Staffing: 46 percent struggle to supply adequate IT staff at ROBOs. In fact, they often have no IT staff onsite. This makes it especially difficult to supervise backups. 
• Provisioning delays: 45 percent reported the time it takes them to provision ROBO infrastructure, applications and services hurt their organizations’ ability to generate revenue.

Respondents also mentioned that they would like alterative options to storing the data generating at remote office locations locally in the ROBO. Where organizations store ROBO data is crucial to achieving operational efficiencies and high availability. Three-quarters (75 percent) of the respondents say that consolidating ROBO data back to the data center, or in the cloud, was somewhat to extremely desirable. And therein lays the solution.

Zero Branch IT

IT can reduce the costs and complexities of managing a highly distributed environment without increasing security risks by implementing a “Zero Branch IT” model to centralize all systems and services. IT manages everything inside a secure, centralized datacenter and delivers applications and data to users at ROBOs. The key benefits include:

• Hardened security posture: 100 percent of data is secured in the data center (also eliminating the need for remote backup processes), not sitting on a piece of hardware in a far-away ROBO location, out of your control; and without compromise to remote user productivity. All data is encrypted at-rest and in-motion for true end-to-end encryption.
• Improved user productivity: Generate up to a 100x increase in remote application performance. Users will encounter far fewer instances of downtime due to system outages or poor performance. Ensuring information and system availability enables users to get their work done using any device they choose.
• Ensure business continuity: 100x faster recovery times (RTO) minimizes the business damage done by outages. Perform backup and recovery operations from a central location, and in mere seconds instead of days or weeks.
• Improved operational agility: IT can deploy new branch services and sites in under 15 minutes, and manage everything via the central dashboard. All heavy ROBO IT operations, such as provisioning new services and sites, and recovery of sites in the case of outages, take seconds or minutes instead of days, weeks or longer.  Remote backup headaches are completely eliminated because data no longer lives at the edge. The result is a more agile IT team that is better able to support the always-changing needs of the business.

Consolidating infrastructure at the edge is just the first step. Cobbling together disparate pieces of hardware into one appliance will not solve short- or long-term performance, data security and management issues. An effective Zero Branch IT model requires making the edges “stateless.”

If you’re a storage professional, you know “state” means facing daily operational challenges to manage and protect data at the ROBO that’s vulnerable to loss and theft. A lost storage piece at the ROBO will require hours, days, (or in some cases longer) of effort to bring it back online. And there’s no guarantee of success, particularly when resorting to older backups. Moving data storage from the edges to the central data center creates stateless data stores, and in ideal scenarios, this can be done without compromising any of the user experience at the edge. And since data assets are now centralized, the state remains only within the data center, where IT staff is readily available at all times, and enterprise-class investments are in place, and therefore, the highest levels of protection exist.

In the data rich and application-driven, distributed world that we do business in today, it’s important for IT and Infrastructure architects and professionals to consider a new approach to remote IT by software-defining the edge. This enables IT organizations to centrally control the personality of every single location in the business no matter where they are. IT decides which applications, data and services need to be available to workers at specific ROBOs, and when, in order to maintain the highest productivity levels and meet changing business requirements that allow enterprises and organizations to always stay at the top of their game: competitive and always focused on customer success.

As the business center-of-gravity moves away from the central office and out to the edge of the network, the findings of the 2016 Riverbed (News - Alert) Remote Office/Branch Office IT Survey illustrate how IT organizations have their hands full supporting ROBOs. The solution may sound counterintuitive: Do not allocate more reoccurring spending on infrastructure and operational resources to ROBOs, but instead, invest in bringing those operations back to the central office.

About the Author:

Alison Conigliaro-Hubbard is senior director for Riverbed Technology. She is responsible for worldwide Product Marketing for SteelFusion, the world’s first Software-Defined Edge solution specifically geared to address the costly operational and business challenges resonant in a world of increasingly distributed enterprise architectures. 

Conigliaro-Hubbard brings almost 20 years of experience in infrastructure, data center, cloud technologies, in sales and product marketing and has held global OEM channels leadership roles at Cisco Systems, Brocade (News - Alert), Autodesk and GreenButton, now a part of the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

She is a graduate of the University of Miami with a Bachelor’s in Broadcast Communications and Marketing.