If your business has remote offices spread across the globe, you'll know that these locations require a complete set of IT services to enable employees to work effectively and productively and to keep customers engaged.

Unlike data centers, remote offices need to supplement full infrastructure stacks with bandwidth optimisation, remote file and application delivery services, plus of course security services and appliances.

There have been a number of studies in recent months by the likes of IDC and Forrester to examine converged infrastructure as a solution to address the unique needs of these remote offices.

What is relatively consistent in such reports is the business' desire to migrate away from remote office solutions based on discrete system components toward solutions based on integrated and virtualised stacks, and a continued push to centralise all management and operational tasks taking the high cost and burden away from outsourced or lower skilled IT staff from visiting branches to perform often mundane IT tasks.

The implications in selecting remote office support solutions mean that businesses should be looking at deploying integrated and centrally managed solutions that require no local IT resources beyond the initial physical installation. 

We see many of these such publications as a little one sided - often favouring the vendor that has comissioned the study (as one would expect). What we @Cisilion see in reality is a little more complex than that. What we see if businesses exploring options around

• Centralisation - moving as many IT services as they can to the Data Centre
• Application Acceleration through WAN Acceleration services
• Migration to Cloud Services - whether this be Office 365, hosted telephony, or hosted CRM for example
• Centralised or Cloud Managed Wireless Networks (with a wireless first objective)
• Flexibility through Mobility - with secure BYOD or corporate managed SmartPhones

What becomes apparent is that all of these challenges mean introducing new layers of IT or decentralising the traditional boundaries of IT and the management that goes with it.

With these extended boundaries and management often comes questions and concerns around security - who is responsible, who manages it and how good is it....

If this sounds familiar, we'd love to hear from you at info@cisilion.com or @Cisilion