Organisations in the region are facing challenges such as delays in provisioning applications, recovering from disasters, and managing data backups when managing IT at remote and branch offices, a report said.

Riverbed Technology, the application performance company, today (June 22) released the results of a survey which asked IT professionals about the various challenges they face in provisioning and managing remote and branch offices (ROBOs) and found supporting the IT edge was expensive, resource-intensive and full of potential data security risks.

IT at the edge continues to be provisioned and managed largely as it has been for the past 20 years, with distributed IT spread out across potentially hundreds of remote and branch locations.

However, this approach can bring data risk and operational penalties to companies at an extremely high cost, and in today’s increasingly distributed enterprise with a primary focus on data and security, past approaches may not be ideal for business success. Given the various challenges associated with managing remote sites, organizations have their hands full in supporting the edge.

The top three challenges of managing ROBOs in order of importance are:

(1)    Handling ROBO disaster recovery (54 per cent)
(2)    High costs of providing ROBO IT (46 per cent)
(3)    Providing adequate IT staff to support ROBOs (46 per cent)

By all indications, today’s ROBO IT practices are significantly impacting the bottom line. Companies face substantial financial losses when recovering from an outage or struggling to provision new services or apps to hundreds of sites – along with the cost of supplying IT staff onsite at each location.

Respondents were asked to rank the degree of financial impact of individual challenges related to managing ROBOs. The percentages below reflect the respondents who ranked each item as having an “extremely to somewhat large” financial impact:

(1)    Delays in provisioning infrastructure, apps and new services to a ROBO (45 per cent)
(2)    Delays in recovering from ROBO outages (44 per cent)
(3)    IT staff time taken to manage ROBO backups (39 per cent)

The survey also found that respondents would like alternative options to storing data generated at remote office locations locally in the ROBO. When data is stored locally on physical servers in remote facilities or branch offices, it is especially susceptible to security risks, such as theft, human error or natural disasters. Not surprisingly, three quarters (75 per cent) of respondents said that it would be “somewhat to extremely desirable” to store their remote data in the data center or in the cloud.

“The new Riverbed survey shows that companies are really struggling to effectively and efficiently manage their IT operations at the edge,” said Taj ElKhayat, Regional Vice President, Middle East and Africa at Riverbed.

“As companies continue to move more of their operations to remote locations, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage their backup and recovery processes and provide adequate IT staff onsite at each individual location.

“Riverbed’s SteelFusion is re-defining remote and branch office IT by allowing businesses to centralize ROBO IT operations and data in the data center (and/or the cloud), without any negative impact on remote office application performance, therefore simplifying IT management at remote locations while reducing overall costs,” he added.

Riverbed SteelFusion delivers unprecedented simplicity, agility, data security, and business continuity to distributed enterprises, he noted.

SteelFusion enables a software-defined edge by bringing together best-of-breed virtualization, intelligent storage caching, and industry-leading WAN optimization into a single hyper-converged infrastructure solution that meets both the needs of the enterprise for low operational costs, high security, and fast business agility as well as the needs of branch employees for high-performing applications that simply work so they can do their jobs. – TradeArabia News Service