Branch offices are the core of most businesses. Over 80 percent of employees operate outside of business headquarters, and this is where companies of all sizes meet their customers.
So IT performance at the branch is important. However these locations at the edge of the network must overcome limited management visibility and control, as well as a lack of on-site technical staff.
The Many Challenges of Branch Office Management
While uptime is vitally important, branch offices don't have the wide range of computer, network and power infrastructure found at the head office. Highly integrated network devices and computers are deployed, so there's less infrastructure to worry about - and disaster recovery facilities are commonly deployed very thinly at the edge. The lack on-site IT staff to handle common routine maintenance tasks exacerbates this. The result is unnecessary outages and high support costs.
Downtime incidents can be common and recovery often requires a site visit. This may require third party contractors to be outsourced on short notice. Such third party support is costly. It also introduces security complexities when allowing contractors access to corporate data and private customer information.
Managing the mishmash of IT infrastructure that is distributed across regional headquarters, branches and home offices - all diversely interconnected through private and public networks - can be challenging, time consuming and costly. A dispersed array of head office IT administrators, third party applications specialists, vendor help desks and other service providers each seek to access and control a piece of this infrastructure. Traditional in-band management tools simply cannot provide this access, while guaranteeing the availability and security of the branch office environment.
Identifying the cause of remote branch network problems can be a costly challenge for the head office IT support groups. The amount of time needed to identify, isolate and resolve a problem at a remote location takes many times more than a similar problem at headquarters - due to the lack of support staff, tools and visibility at remote sites.
Opengear Solves the Branch Office Challenge
Opengear delivers proven, reliable and easily scalable solutions that address the challenges of managing branch offices and remote sites:
- Discover visibility, access and control over your entire distributed IT assets from a single monitor. Opengear delivers virtual onsite hands and eyes so there's no need for IT staff at each branch.
- Instantly diagnose problems with a glance at the Dashboard and instigate recovery capabilities without having to deploy expensive resources on-site. Or configure the Opengear appliance to autonomously detect and fix remote issues at the site.
- Access and control all the infrastructure in your branch offices. One solution delivers remote IT management, environmental monitoring, security and power management. Manage computers, switches, routers, firewalls and more.
- Maintain always on management connectivity with your branch locations - even when the network is down with automatic failover and Out-Of-Band (with broadband, satellite, 802.11 wireless, modem and cellular access options).
- Use your virtual onsite hands to get into and repair remote components, power cycle devices and change access privileges - even when the main network connections are lost or devices are down.
- Minimize risk by deploying secure platforms that applies enterprise-grade security access policies to all the devices at the remote branch. Opengear solutions ensure compliance with your internal management policies - regardless of the state of the network.
- Monitor the branch office security beyond IT (temperature, humidity, smoke, motion, water, door open, security camera) with central and local alerts and logging.
- Deploy local and out of band management capabilities that complement and integrate with your existing in-band, centralized monitoring systems (SNMP, Nagios, Zenoss, Solarwinds).
With an Opengear solution you can operate your business and manage your branches more efficiently and cost-effectively.
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