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, says Brent Lees, senior product marketing manager for EMEA of Riverbed Technology.
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.
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. With the average enterprise operating 55 branch offices, it’s no wonder organisations are spending more than $4-billion annually on remote IT.
Changing the approach to remote IT
With so much at stake, it no longer makes sense for today’s organisations to rely on traditional methods of technology deployment and management. 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.
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.
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.
Branch convergence in action
Taking the example of a global organisation again, it can overcome its issues by implementing a branch converged infrastructure to store remote office data in hub data centres, managing and protecting it on highly reliable storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) devices.
Instances of block-level data – including virtual machines – are then projected out to the remote offices. With the use of integrated storage delivery and WAN optimisation technology, the performance is equal to previous local data storage. The users see no difference, and the information is safer.
As a result of the initiative, an organisation will no longer need to maintain its smaller, more vulnerable remote data centres. Users know that their data is more secure should anything happen at the local level, and employees in branch offices can focus on their own work without having to help IT maintain their technology.
Benefits of branch convergence
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. The result is a smaller branch footprint that still provides users with the resources they need locally.
Previously distributed critical tasks like server and application patching, and data protection operations can be performed with skilled personnel in the data centre, improving an organisation’s ability to recover from a disaster. If a disaster incident does occur in one of the branch locations, all data and virtualised branch servers are safe and instantly recoverable from the data centre.
Adopting an effective solution
While businesses operate in a wide variety of industries, central to any organisation today is the need for fast, effective recovery to ensure business uptime. With seemingly more frequent reports of disasters – natural or man-made – what should today’s enterprises consider to protect their sensitive branch data?
* The initiative should allow the business to eliminate backup and recovery solutions at the remote site. Manual tape backups done on a local-level are costly, and frequently result in less effective disaster recovery capability as they can be prone to errors.
* Ensure the enterprise can quickly provision remote IT services from the central data centre. This reduces IT man hours, saving time and reducing expenses. Once the solution is deployed, the central data centre must have full control over the data being used at the branch level.
* Without the ability to perform rapid recovery, every minute of downtime means more lost revenue. The enterprise should ensure that the branch infrastructure delivers the fastest recovery possible in the aftermath of a disaster.
* Even with the best technology, the WAN may still suffer from downtime. Businesses should have access to applications and centralised data when the connection is inoperative.
* To minimise security risks, organisations should ensure that sensitive data is properly encrypted, both at rest and in transition, and that data kept in the branch is limited to active data sets.
Businesses shouldn’t feel strangled by their growth, with inefficiencies increasing as new offices are opened. Working to simplify branch IT with centralised data storage and recovery operations can ensure consistent uptime, regardless of what happens to a branch office.
Enterprises should work with their technology partners to develop a converged branch infrastructure that will protect their information, helping them keep their heads above water in case of a disaster.
