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About 90% of employees today work away from their company's headquarters, on average, and 40% work at a remote location, away from their supervisors. What technologies do you need to have in place to ensure that those employees are at their most productive? This weekly alert by Nemertes Research will explore answers to that question, covering collaboration technologies, WAN optimization strategies, network performance management and other issues vital to network managers and CIOs whose companies have branch offices and remote workers. The alert also includes the latest remote office news headlines on NetworkWorld.com.

Reducing your branch-office clutter pays off

Benefits of consolidated networking gear for branch offices

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter  By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 02/07/06

Nearly two years ago, my house caught on fire and everything but the outside walls had to be gutted and rebuilt. But from every disaster emerges silver linings - and indeed, we discovered many.

One of those was the ability to minimize and consolidate - fewer toys, clothes, electronics, and indeed, IT infrastructure. With four school-age children and two work-at-home parents, computers, printers, and scanners were all-too-plentiful in our home.

So we installed Category 3 and Category 5 cabling throughout the house and put in a small “server room” that houses and protects all the electronics and IT infrastructure. We reduced the number of printers, termination devices, and Internet access lines. And we now spend very little time troubleshooting IT problems.

Why? There simply are fewer devices and connections that can have problems now.

That’s one of the huge benefits of consolidated networking gear for branch offices. With the explosion of branch offices (91% of all employees, on average, work in a branch location, whether large or small), the functions inherent in a variety of products are necessary at each site.

Products, including multifunction routers, services gateways and unified threat management (UTM) devices, provide many of the tasks without wrapping a box around each one. Rather than having separate boxes for switching (voice and data), routing, intrusion-detection, and network optimization, these products provide some or all of these functions (and even more) in a single device.

Why does that matter? The median number of devices at a branch office is six. That means IT staffs are installing, managing, and troubleshooting six devices (and the links to them) at dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of branch-office locations. Reducing the number of devices offers several benefits, including reduced space requirements, small number of physical devices to manage/install, and fewer product lines to learn and program.

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