In terms of the availability of IT staff and resources, branch offices can often feel left to fend for themselves. Think Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone” – especially in today’s era of remote working. But that story can have a happy ending, too!
Growing organizations are prone to data silos. As a company expands, new business needs may have to be addressed quickly and additional business units may be created. Unfortunately, not many businesses can afford to have IT staff at every branch location. Those branches and remote workers need to rely heavily on centralized IT support, and that can lead to the feeling of being left behind.
On the other hand, the overworked “core” IT teams often don’t have the same insight into what’s happening locally, they may not quite understand branch employee needs, and they certainly don’t have the same means to troubleshoot issues. Imagine if Kevin’s mom came home before the wet bandits tried to break in – it would be a lot easier for everyone (albeit slightly less interesting plot-wise).
Of course, not unlike Macaulay Culkin, branch offices may be very resourceful and manage to get by. But life very rarely plays out like a beloved Christmas flick, so there’s a very good chance that they’re not going to find the best solutions. Worse, they may overlook key needs and corporate mandates around security and compliance. Shadow IT, for instance, has become a huge issue, as employees increasingly bypass formal IT channels to become direct consumers of cloud applications, contributing to both network security and performance issues.
Learn more about four major network problems many modern organizations are struggling with and how you can solve them!
The cavalry is coming!
On the bright side, if the remote working trend has taught us anything over the past couple of years, it’s that geography doesn’t need to limit business operations. Your company originates from the States and has branch office in France? That’s fine, no need to improvise like Kevin’s mom because today you have the perfect opportunity to adopt new network practices that unify all aspects and locations within your enterprise!
The cloud, in particular, has made it much easier for distributed organizations to implement consistent IT practices across the organization. Let’s take the adoption of SD-WAN, for example. SD-WAN helps businesses securely connect all users in every location to applications and other corporate resources. In the end, everyone gets enhanced performance, increased security, and reliable, consistent connectivity. If you’d like a deeper dive into the benefits of adopting an SD-WAN solution, check this blog entry.
Five reasons why SD-WAN makes the life of network administrators better
A natural evolution toward cloud
What’s more, at the top level, IT teams can leverage SD-WAN’s cloud-based network management tools for full visibility into their entire network – from headquarters to the smallest or farthest branch, regardless of their network access. In that particular case, you might want to take a look at ExtremeCloud IQ – our award-winning cloud management platform.
SD-WAN is a tried and true, trusted cloud onramp for the enterprise. If you can answer “YES” to any of the four questions below, you should definitely start thinking about adopting the Software-Defined Wide Area Network approach:
- Is my business rapidly expanding or diverse geographically?
- Is my organization looking toward cloud migration?
- Does my business suffer from frequent network disruptions which impact the SLAs and applications performance?
- Am I getting worried about how secure my WAN really is?
Goodbye tradition, hello Fabric
Cloud and SD-WAN may hold the key to solving many of today’s IT pain points, but certainly not all of them. There are other problems remaining, namely long wait times required for the network additions or changes to kick in or sluggish application deployment and services provisioning, stemming from rigid design constraints of legacy networks.
To solve these problems, we’ve come up with Extreme Fabric Connect – a market-proven solution that delivers agility and security to the underlying network. And the great thing is, its capabilities can be natively extended beyond the traditional Data Center or Campus to any of your remote or branch locations connected by a WAN service! If you’d like to learn more about the amazing benefits of extending the Extreme Fabric Connect solution to your remote office, follow this article.
Learn more about Extreme Fabric Connect!
Bring the family together
Digital transformation projects around the globe were accelerated during the COVID pandemic, supported by network solutions and tools. But today, as they implement cloud strategies, businesses are finding that it’s just not good parenting to overlook their branch locations. A branch’s digital transformation must also be part of the overall model.
At Extreme, we’re putting our trust in SD-WAN. This solution is the way to ensure your branches don’t end up home alone, apart from the main office. We all know you can’t ignore an aspect of your network for too long before it becomes your biggest problem. SD-WAN provides the perfect supervision proactive management to help you unify, optimize, and create the happy, healthy family your business needs.
Would you like to learn more about our latest SD-WAN solution?