CIOIN

The need to establish a presence in strategic areas is forcing businesses to open new branch offices where remote employees expect the same network applications, services and performance as employees located at corporate headquarters. Unfortunately, IT organizations do not have unlimited budgets or headcounts. Therefore in most cases, there are no IT support personnel permanently available at remote locations.

Although server centralization, consolidation and the move towards web-enabled applications have business benefits, optimal productivity can still only be achieved when the same level of services are available in remote sites as in the corporate headquarters.

Unfortunately, even the best-planned deployment can potentially leave remote offices and users vulnerable to performance degradation and availability issues. This creates additional challenges for the headquarters IT staff in maintaining remote site performance, availability, security and visibility.

Just as in the headquarters environment, when remote users complain about poor performance, IT staff must be able to determine the root cause of the problem and correct the situation. Remote office network outages and slowdowns are made far more difficult to solve because of the challenges presented by distance, travel time and the need for tools that may not necessarily be available at the remote location. Organizing the necessary tools and dispatching staff to remote locations to troubleshoot problems is both time consuming and expensive.

One method of solving these issues is to implement a strategy that spans both the remote site and the corporate headquarters site. With the right information and tools, IT staff are able to understand and resolve issues quickly and efficiently. Adding the appropriate level of visibility, IT staff could even identify remote network degradations before they become significant problems at that remote site. This strategy provides IT staff with the opportunity to take proactive action to eliminate congestion and other problems that could affect remote sites and interfere with operations. Additionally, the ability to enable staff to resolve problems from the headquarters site will avoid the need to dispatch staff and results in timesavings and increased network availability.