Centralising applications

Branch offices are an important channel to market providing local knowledge and a point of contact for enterprises with a distributed customer base. But to be effective, branch office employees need fast access to applications such as finance, ERP, email, file sharing and telephony. A common result of this is that independent islands' of IT evolve within each branch which gives rise to a high degree of replication and proliferation in many enterprises.

Consequently branch office IT has become difficult to manage and maintain, particularly in terms of regulatory compliance. This complexity has in many cases prevented the evolution of new and better ways of working, which poses a serious risk to the competitive advantage of your enterprise.

Data Integration recommends a number of solutions to help you build a centralised, consolidated IT architecture which joins up business processes across branches and enables greater customer focus:

• Removing application servers from branch offices and centralising into data centres.
• Converging voice and data networks and deploying centralised IP telephony.
• Deploying web based applications which can be delivered across VPNs, reducing the need to for private WANs.
• Streamlining branch office security to make policy enforcement easier by running IPSec VPNs, antivirus, intrusion detection and prevention, denial of service mitigation, web filtering functionality and routing in a single device.

Data Integration can help you with any of these initiatives and ensure that application performance is maintained whilst you go through the transition.