The desire to provide remote workers with seamless access to corporate data is one shared by many enterprises these days. More and more employees work outside of corporate headquarters, and keeping these populations productive requires optimizing branch office networks.

Aberdeen Group found that an average of 52% of the total workforce is working outside of corporate headquarters, and companies expect that number to increase by 7% by the end of 2008. Meanwhile, 62% of companies’ servers and 65% of their enterprise applications have been centralized. Some of the biggest challenges enterprises report as a result of having a dispersed population are improving employee productivity (cited by 83% of organizations); optimizing network costs (56%); insuring business continuity (53%); and protecting corporate data (47%).

Early this year the research firm surveyed 177 organizations in an effort to glean best practices from those companies that are adept at improving application performance at the branch and reducing end user complaints related to application delivery. (The result of its research -- a report titled “The roadmap to next generation branch office networks” -- is available for free download until May 2 from Aberdeen’s Web site.)

While some companies are taking steps early on to ensure application performance doesn’t suffer as a result of a consolidation project, others are addressing performance issues only after they become a problem, notes Bojan Simic, a research analyst at Aberdeen.

“We can definitely see that things are changing, that now more organizations are being proactive, thinking about what’s going to happen to application performance before they actually start moving data storage to fewer locations,” Simic says. “But it’s still not across the board, it’s still not part of every organization’s strategic plan.”

Those companies that are most effective at optimizing branch office networks share a few common characteristics, Aberdeen found. For example, those companies deemed “best in class” are twice as likely to have tools for monitoring and enforcing network usage policies than those deemed “laggards,” and twice as likely to have tools in place for prioritization of business critical applications. They were also three times as likely to have protocol-specific optimization tools in place as compared to the laggards.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.