Remote Control - Empower and consolidate your remote office data

The average branch has between four and six servers (Source: Nemertes Research); and companies are spending £3 billion a year on branch servers, storage, backup and management (Source: IDC, Gartner, Cisco Analysis).

In fact, experts have estimated that the financial impact of building an effective infrastructure for each remote branch can amount to as much as £10,000 per office, even escalating to £50,000. Yet in many cases, the dedicated server designed to power thousands of users services a few dozen staff at most, with capacity going to waste. Even so, unless you completely duplicate every resource – impractical for most organisations – users at the edge of the enterprise never experience the same levels of service as those in head office, and however much you spend on software, servers, storage and skills, you will never recoup this investment through raised productivity.

Again according to Gartner, data volumes mean that most organisations fail to complete up to 60%–70% of their daily backups, an inconsistent approach that puts the business at risk operationally.  Planning for business continuity and disaster recovery also frequently takes a back seat to more immediately pressing business concerns.

Finally, where data is held remotely, it becomes increasingly difficult to manage it in line with good corporate governance standards. Responsibility has to be delegated to branch office staff for whom it is not a core task. They often lack the necessary technical expertise, knowledge of statutory requirements and time to ensure rigorous adherence to corporate policy, leaving the business open to non-compliance on data protection and retention rules. Even the day-to-day benefits of holding data locally – speed of communication and easy access among them – evaporate on closer inspection. Access to centrally held files can be painfully slow. Cisco reckons that a delay in accessing business-critical applications of just 10 seconds per employee every day was at one point costing the company £325,000 a year. Moreover, remote operations become vulnerable to loss of service with inadequate support to recover data, as few organisations  can afford the overhead of replicating their IT teams at every remote branch.

Upgrading to new versions of existing  applications and deploying innovative applications to drive the business forwards is expensive, complex and time-consuming, involving a branch-by-branch adoption. So, while at first sight, holding data locally seems to make sense, in the long term the threats to business continuity and operational inefficiency are compounded.

To help you consolidate and centralise your data, please request a demo at www.arrowecs.co.uk/demo, or contact RODC@arrowecs.co.uk

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