Knowing what's out yonder

One of the most important strategies of effective branch-office management is simply knowing what you’re managing. It sounds pretty basic, but many IT executives haven’t identified and categorized their branch-office inventories.

As I outlined last week , Nemertes has identified the branch-office market as a four-tier structure - including headquarters it’s a five-tier structure:

Tier One
Number of users: 500 or more
Bandwidth: High (typically OC-3 and greater, sometimes T-3), very large concentration of employees, access to all applications
Typical types of sites: Headquarters, data center

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One of the most important strategies of effective branch-office management is simply knowing what you’re managing. It sounds pretty basic, but many IT executives haven’t identified and categorized their branch-office inventories.

As I outlined last week , Nemertes has identified the branch-office market as a four-tier structure - including headquarters it’s a five-tier structure:

Tier One
Number of users: 500 or more
Bandwidth: High (typically OC-3 and greater, sometimes T-3), very large concentration of employees, access to all applications
Typical types of sites: Headquarters, data center

Tier Two
Number of users: 301 to 1,000
Bandwidth: High (T-3 and greater), large percentages of employees, access to all applications
Typical types of sites: R&D facilities, large contact centers, largest regional offices

Tier Three
Number of users: 51 to 300 
Bandwidth: Relatively high (multiple T-1 to T-3), significant concentration of employees or important executive's individual office, access to all applications
Typical types of sites: Mid-size branch offices, distribution facilities, midsize contact centers, CEO or executive home office

Tier Four
Users: 2 to 50
Bandwidth: Lower (T-1, or cable modem/DSL), small concentration of employees, access to most applications
Typical types of sites: Small branch offices, retail sites, manufacturing facilities

Tier Five
Users: 1
Bandwidth: Lower (56Kbps to -T-1 or cable modem/DSL); individual offices, access to some applications
Typical types of sites: Telecommuters, mobile workers
 
Let’s look at some of these tiers and the challenges organizations face when they’re trying to manage them, starting with Tiers Four and Five.

Tier Five sites often are the most difficult to manage. First, there are a lot of them. The average company has 1,100 telecommuters — a number that, depending on company size, ranges from 1 to 25,000, according to Nemertes’ latest Convergence benchmark. Each telecommuter is another location, so it increases the actual number of sites network and IT staffs must manage often by orders of magnitude!

Couple that with the fact that telecommuters and mobile workers typically are alone. They don’t have a tech-savvy colleague who can step into the office or hotel room and fine-tune an application, troubleshoot a cable modem or BlackBerry, or figure out why the wireless link isn’t working.

And then there are the telecommuters who may be tech-savvy, or think they are. They connect their work computers to a home-area network, which often includes wireless access. However, this could open the work computer — and the applications connected to it — to security breaches.

Small branch offices have some similar characteristics. Like home offices, we’re seeing an increase in the number of small branch offices leveraging the low cost of DSL or cable modem services. And often, they’re sales or retail locations where there are no tech-savvy employees who can troubleshoot minor problems.

Central IT and network staffs spend about 25% of their time, on average, managing these branch offices. And many are getting frustrated at the amount of time they’re spending troubleshooting network issues and application-performance problems.