Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 11/21/06

Providing IT, desktop, and network support to the branch is one of the biggest challenges organizations face with their growing virtual workplaces.

Nemertes is in the middle of its next benchmark, Building a Successful Virtual Workplace, and early trending about branch office management shows the vast majority of organizations have very little IT support at their branch offices. (In fact, if you want to participate in this benchmark and see the findings first-hand, contact us.)

Again, the results are still preliminary, but so far, only about 5% of branch offices have any onsite IT personnel, on average. The range, though, is huge, spanning zero to 100% of branch offices with IT staff on site. Not surprisingly, small and midsize organizations tend to have the highest penetration, simply because they have the fewest number of locations.

What this emphasizes is the need for powerful remote monitoring or management tools, relationships with third-party managed-service providers (MSP), or a combination of both. In conversations with hundreds of IT executives, the common theme is that this is an area that is lacking sophistication - and it’s a top-priority item on some organizations’ project list for 2007.

About 30% of organizations use service providers or a combination of internal management with service providers to oversee branch operations. We expect that figure to increase, considering the continued growth in the number of branch offices and virtual workers - and the demands for predictable, efficient access to applications and data residing in the data center.

We recommend organizations:

* Escalate the priority of branch office management, considering the growth rates and the need for top-quality performance.

* Consider third-party help for desktop support and network connectivity/infrastructure.

* Evaluate carefully the option of hosting certain applications, including VoIP, unified messaging, and audioconferencing, for branch offices to offload monitoring and management to a third party.

* Regularly assess the management and monitoring tools and services/portals that are available to help you manage the branch.

I will be reporting on numerous findings of this next benchmark during the coming months, so stay tuned….