Security, compliance, and disaster recovery top the list of remote office and branch office (ROBO) IT priorities, according to a new study by Enterprise Strategy Group. The analysts asked survey respondents to rate the relative importance of 15 different IT initiatives at ROBO locations. Respondents attached the highest priority to "improving information security measures", followed by "ensuring compliance with government, industry, or corporate governance mandates", and "improving disaster recovery processes". Improving application performance and accessibility for ROBO users were next in line in terms of importance.

"IT professionals located in remote and branch offices are in agreement with their colleagues at corporate headquarters: Improving information security, regulatory compliance, and disaster recovery readiness -- while ensuring improved application access and performance for ROBO users -- are key IT challenges and concerns," said Brian Garrett, an analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "With insights into the real issues that IT organizations face today; their future business and technology requirements; and the products and services being adopted in increasing numbers, this research provides actionable insight for any reader seeking to understand the market for WAN optimization, WAFS and remote data protection solutions."

Among the report’s many findings:

• IT service centralization helps address ROBO priorities, but organizations are challenged by performance problems and high bandwidth costs. End-users see IT service centralization as a way to address top ROBO priorities such as improving data protection, bolstering information security, and reducing costs. However, organizations continue to experience numerous challenges in their efforts to deliver IT services to remote locations, primarily poor application performance, slow file transfer speeds, and high WAN bandwidth costs. These challenges tend to affect all organizations regardless of size or IT budget.
• Security concerns and resource constraints at ROBO locations drives current and planned remote backup activity. Organizations that currently use or expect to implement remote backup technologies do so primarily because of a lack of qualified IT resources at ROBO locations, concerns over the security of backup data at those locations, and high capital and operational costs associated with the data protection process.

About the market research report

The ESG 67-page report, "Branch Office Optimization", examines the major IT priorities at and challenges currently faced by organizations’ remote office/branch office (or “ROBO”) locations. More importantly, the report analyzes how organizations plan to address those challenges both from a technology and process perspective. The report is based on a survey of 626 IT professionals at North American public- and private-sector organizations, ranging in size from 100 to more than 20,000 employees. ESG interviewed respondents from both ROBO and headquarters locations to help better understand the perspectives and attitudes of the different constituents involved in making remote office/branch office IT decisions. The report also includes insightful quotes taken directly from the transcripts of ESG’s in-depth interviews with end-users.

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