Today’s business climate has required traditional enterprises to become increasingly flexible about how they conduct their operations. Revenues always drive the bottom line, and organizations are under pressure to operate more efficiently while simultaneously growing and innovating. Technology can be both a blessing and a curse when it comes to managing the decentralized branch office architecture and opportunities abound for out-of-band management.
WAN infrastructure is the key to branch office success, and the market for WAN optimization technologies is growing at a rapid rate. According to IDC (News - Alert), there is a trend within Fortune 1000 organizations toward global data centers, branch offices and workforces, and as such, the WAN optimization market is undergoing double-digit growth globally.
Dell’ (News - Alert)Oro Group forecasts the market will top $1.5 billion by 2016, driven by expansion trends, an increasingly remote workforce and the explosion of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement. The rise of the branch office ultimately means there is an increased need for remote compute, storage and networking infrastructures along with the simultaneous pressure to keep costs down. On-premises equipment and the IT manpower required to monitor and maintain it is simply not practical when enterprises have so many sites to manage, making out-of-band management an attractive option.
Being able to manage systems and equipment remotely, even in the event of an outage, is critical to branch office success. And by its very nature, a distributed network of decentralized offices creates vulnerabilities since critical IT support staff is typically not available onsite. This makes remote access even more important to ensuring business continuity and smooth and secure operations.
Out-of-band management, including WAN optimization solutions, provides the type of centralized management that is crucial for branch office success. Typically these offerings present a central view of all local assets as well as the ability to manage and troubleshoot them efficiently. Having out-of-band management of servers, networking and WAN equipment lets IT departments identify and troubleshoot problems before traffic and operations are impacted. Many solutions also allow for cellular access in the event of a WAN outage as well.
Business continuity, efficiency and cost control are all important elements in the success of the branch office architecture, and trying to keep systems and networks running smoothly from multiple premises can be costly, complex and time consuming. Out-of-band offerings provide a remote alternative, and one that is an ideal fit for today’s decentralized branch offices.