The IT-Lite branch office

This is the third in a series of three newsletters intended to demonstrate that the next generation branch office represents a multi-year migration away from branch offices that are IT-heavy to ones that are IT-lite and that as part of this migration, the WAN plays an ever increasing role in application delivery. Part 1: The Evolving Branch OfficePart 2: Today's branch office There is no doubt that over the next couple of years that relatively few branch offices will truly be server-less. This newsletter will look ahead and will discuss the IT-lite design towards which most IT organizations are migrating. There is also no doubt, however, that as IT organizations continue to adopt an IT-lite branch office design, they will continue to have fewer IT resources in the branch office.

That device could be a router from a vendor such as Cisco, a WAN optimization controller from a company such as Riverbed, or a branch office box from a company such as Microsoft. In many cases, it will be difficult to find a server in a branch office as there will be one primary device in the branch office and it will support myriad functionality. Each branch office employee will continue to have a computing device such as a desktop computer, a laptop or a smartphone. Given the current economic environment and the pressure to minimize business travel and yet maximize collaboration, it is highly likely that most IT organizations will make an ever increasing use of unified communications (UC). Depending on the extent of the deployment of UC, this could cause a dramatic shift in the amount of real-time traffic that the branch office network will have to support. However, due to the ongoing deployment of desktop virtualization, the branch office users' desktop and applications are likely to be stored at a central data center.

Real-time traffic over the WAN poses a challenge because it generally requires higher priority than data applications and can consume significant WAN bandwidth, especially if desktop videoconferencing is involved. This will necessitate the use of a WAN service. Given the momentum in the market, it is also highly likely that over the next few years that branch office employees will increasingly access applications that are acquired from a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. The question is: Which WAN service? An Internet overlay from a company such as Akamai? The Internet?

An MPLS service? The obvious answer is yes – all of the above. An MPLS service supplemented by WAN optimization functionality? In future newsletters we will come back to this issue and talk more about how we see cloud networking evolving.