COMMENT
F
rom an IT perspective branch
offices, remote sites, retail
locations and manufacturing
sites are no less difficult to manage
than corporate headquarters, despite
having fewer employees and a much
smaller physical footprint. In addition
to this, these sites are the revenue-
generating front lines when it comes
to business today.
There is no room for legacy IT
When it comes to IT, legacy
approaches to enterprise infrastructure
are costly and complex to manage.
Businesses become exposed to
an increasing number of security
breaches and data loss and it can
often take longer to recover from
unplanned outages. By eliminating
traditional server, storage and backup
systems at each branch office and
instead creating a “Zero Branch
IT” model comprised of a hyper-
converged infrastructure solution, IT
can dynamically project applications
and data from the centralised data
centre, reducing corporate risk with no
compromise to performance at remote
locations.
As companies migrate more of its
applications and information stores to
various cloud computing services, and
as more employees work remotely, the
network has become more complex
and difficult to manage than ever. The
strain on the WAN routers impacts
performance, which makes delivering
and using applications slow, unreliable
and expensive.
Don’t treat the branch like an
afterthought
Organisations have on average 55
remote IT facilities for every large data
centre. (Source: IDC 2013 Enhancing
Business Value with an Edge-
Optimized Virtual Server and Storage
Delivery Solution.) Additionally, IT has
to devote 50% of its budget to branch
offices, about 50% of all data resides
outside the data centre, and almost
half of all employees work in branch
offices.
An increasing number of organisations
are trying to unfold how they can
streamline operations by converging
technology in the data centre,
consequently ‘hyper-convergence’ has
become a popular term. However, this
does not take into account revenue-
generating edges of the business.
A better approach is ‘hyper-converged
THE PURPOSE OF IT IS TO ESSENTIALLY ADD VALUE TO THE
BOTTOM LINE BUT THIS IS OFTEN CONSTRAINED WHEN THE
CIO AND IT OPERATIONS TEAM IS EXPECTED TO BE NIMBLE,
WHILE TRYING TO KEEP UP WITH THE DISPERSED ISLANDS OF IT
INFRASTRUCTURE ACROSS BRANCH OFFICES
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