What's your Branch Office Strategy?

One of the most challenging tasks for any IT decision maker today is managing

IT in branch offices. It can't be given second priority because branch offices

reach out directly to your company's customers. Unless they're well

connected to HO and have a well-managed IT infrastructure, they won't be able

to serve the customers well. So, your organization's image and future growth

actually depend on how well are the branch offices performing, which in turn

depends upon how well are you managing their IT. You can't, therefore, afford

to ignore the IT in your branch offices, and need a proper strategy to manage

them. This is easier said than done.

Anil Chopra, Associate Editor

There are several key issues involved that hinder proper management of the

branch office IT infrastructure. One of course is availability, or rather the

lack of skilled manpower to deploy there. As the IT infrastructure in the branch

offices is far simpler than that at the HO, it's difficult to find and retain

good people in branch offices. The situation becomes worse if the branches are

in remote areas because nobody wants to go there. Without skilled manpower,

everything else becomes troublesome, whether it's rolling out applications, or

applying a critical patch. In fact, in a survey that we did in July, wherein we

went to a cross section of CIOs across the country, we found that rolling out

applications to remote offices was a very critical issue. As a result, branch

offices are more vulnerable to security threats even though you might have

created a fort out of your head office.

So, what's the solution? How do you manage your branch office? One

possibility is to centralize all core applications and provide remote

connectivity to your branches. However, even this approach has its own problems

that need to be accounted for. First is bandwidth, which needs to be planned and

optimized. This is a task in itself, especially if you're using legacy

applications that are not optimized to work over WAN links. Next is seamless

connectivity, for which you would need to provide redundant communication links

that automatically failover and prevent any disruption in work. The third most

important point is identifying what will be hosted centrally and what will be

local. You can't have everything hosted locally because of management and

security issues, nor can you host everything centrally. For instance, you wouldn't

want work at the branch office to stop just because users are not able to login,

or the PCs can't get an IP address from the DHCP server. What's needed

therefore is a mix of both, which needs to be devised carefully based on the

strength of each branch.

Branch office automation therefore, isn't an easy job, but if planned and

executed properly, can bring in big business benefits for your organization.