According to a recent Nemertes benchmark, an overwhelming percentage of employees - 87% to be exact - work at locations other than the headquarters building or campus, typically at a regional facility, sales office, retail store or even a home office. Furthermore, two-thirds of IT executives say they expect their companies will hire even more remote workers, based on the idea that increased bandwidth costs are offset by real-estate and other savings.

"The number of people at [our] headquarters is shrinking radically because of the cost of facilities," says the CTO of a large healthcare company that employs only 800 of its 24,000 employees at headquarters. "We're shifting people and facilities where they make sense."

As noted last week, most organizations are seeing their bandwidth requirements skyrocket - often reaching triple-digit annual growth. That is occurring because companies are increasingly "pushing" applications out to the remote workforce. They're also adding new applications - such as IP telephony and Web services - that consume additional bandwidth. Supporting Web services is the No. 1 initiative affecting WAN utilization that benchmark participants cite - 42% say it will be a critical issue this year.

The upshot is the remote-office revolution affects everything from the WAN to security policy to disaster recovery to switching fabrics. If any of these challenges sound familiar, you should look into these products and services:

• Bandwidth-optimization products from companies such as Expand Networks, Packeteer and Peribit Networks use compression, caching and quality of service to ensure end-to-end performance across a limited-capacity network, while services and solutions from companies such as Equinix, Internap Network Solutions, Proficient Networks and RouteScience Technologies use route optimization to match traffic requirements to network alternatives.
  
  

IT executives have been slow to adopt some of these products, generally because of a lack of familiarity or unwillingness to introduce additional network complexity. However, virtually everyone who has deployed such products has found them cost-effective, easy to use and highly effective.

• Managed remote-access solutions such as those from Gric Communications, MegaPath Networks and Netifice Communications cut down one of the most-significant cost components - labor - involved in overseeing and administering a far-flung WAN. End-user administration is a major headache and significant cost. We found that companies spend on average $14 per remote user, per month - or a whopping $168 per year. For a company with 1,000 employees, that's a lot of change - and managed remote-access solutions can reduce that burden by up to 40%.
  
  

• Aggregation and other remote-access services such as Fiberlink Communications and iPass let travelers and teleworkers securely and effectively utilize bandwidth that's already in place (such as Wi-Fi and DSL links, and dial-up) to connect back to corporate sites. The key advantage to such approaches is ubiquity - you don't have to rely on the availability of a particular provider's dedicated network.
  
  

"New-age" telcos such as Broadwing, Level 3 Communications, Masergy Communications and Savvis Communications also are giving the traditional telcos (AT&T, Qwest, SBC, Sprint and Verizon) a run for their money by offering increased local and managed services offerings designed to help companies optimize bandwidth use.