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Remote office connectivity for business advantage
 As
businesses grow and expand to different locations, communication and availability
of IT solutions between these locations can prove to be a troublesome and costly
exercise. Souma Das explains how remote office connectivity can provide an advantage
to such businesses
Today, business is all about information—getting the right information
to the right people at the right time and place so they can convert it into
a business advantage.
But when information must be exchanged between geographically separate locations,
particularly in a country with low tele-density, such as India, the process
may not go smoothly. Leased line connectivity is not available at most remote
locations while bandwidth availability in several large cities is severely restricted.
If leased line connectivity has to be provided at remote locations, getting
service quality guarantees from the service provider are simply not possible.
Getting such guarantees in semi-urban centres is easier said than done.
That is why it is necessary to have a centralised solution to ensure connectivity
for business even from remote locations. Let us take the example of an engineering
construction company—call it ABC Limited—with operations all over
the country, to understand how the availability of information can help its
operations. This company provides third-party design and implementation services
for erecting engineering plants and maintains close communication with all its
clients.
Challenges
The challenge before the company is to keep its Delhi-based headquarters informed
about the current need for raw materials, work-in-progress and other important
operational issues. It has a robust enterprise resource planning (ERP) system
that needs to be accessible from remote locations for them to function as an
extended part of the organisation. The remote locations can be made to function
smoother if they can communicate among themselves too. So, if the office at
Jaipur needs some raw material Chandigarh has, for example, it can be requested
directly instead of having to route the request through headquarters.
But those are relatively simple tasks. The more challenging work is to exchange
in real-time details of the plant, particularly when the project is close to
implementation. When the design for the blast furnace or the cold rolling mill
of the steel plant has been finalised, it needs to be executed at the site,
which often is in a remote area. It is therefore critical for the organisation
to keep its IT network up and running to ensure that there are no last minute
details that can delay the implementation process.
At the end of the project, ABC Limited has to transport all the engineering
equipment back to the headquarters or to the site where the next project has
to be executed. Access to company information resources will ensure that the
turnaround time when the engineering equipment can be put to use again is reduced
to the minimum.
Remote office connectivity solutions can play a critical role in helping people
function as the extended arms of the enterprise. It is not a fancy idea about
helping companies get returns on investment at a future date, which takes a
Herculean effort to calculate. It can help companies reduce capital and operating
expenditure by managing their real world needs on a remote network. It is all
about integrating the branch offices of a global company into a cohesive enterprise
network, streamlining integration and providing secure connectivity.
But the engineering construction company we are talking of cannot function like
a monolith. It works as a lean and mean organisation, which has most of its
team out in the market to get more business. Independent research by Cahner
In-Stat confirms that 65 percent of the workforce in today’s companies
work outside the headquarters, i.e. they are out in the field trying to get
more business from existing customers or locating new customers. Ensuring that
these employees receive the same level of information access and support as
those in the headquarters is very important.
The solution
However, there are fundamentally sound reasons for companies, including ABC
Limited, not to maintain large networks outside their headquarters. It is far
cheaper to have a single point of access to centralised resources of the enterprise
instead of local systems at each remote location. A server-centric model, which
keeps application processing on the server and sends only minimal data over
the network, ensures easy and reliable access over multiple connections, whether
broadband or dial-up. Most importantly, it allows enhanced security and efficient,
centralised management of the network. These advantages would immediately grab
the attention of the MIS manager.
But for those who count every rupee that comes in and goes out, there are other
advantages to talk of. Having a centralised network for ABC Limited will reduce
the capital expenditure for technology. That will mean fewer people are required
to maintain the IT network at different locations, fewer servers at these locations,
which a distributed architecture makes it necessary, and better control over
any threat of downtime. When the MIS manager needs to put, let’s say, Jaunpur
in Uttar Pradesh on the map of his network, all he needs is a couple of hours.
That saves time and money too.
A close look at sectors like healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, financial services
and several others suggest that if a lean workforce can successfully sell solutions
to customers in the field, competition can be beaten hands down because of lower
costs. They need to be nimble, something that tends to become the biggest challenge
for large organisations. When organisations are able to think and make decisions
on their feet, with real-time access to required information, they can be more
productive and provide better service.
Perhaps the most widely used application among masses is related to financial
transactions. For a remote branch office to function with mobile workers and
independent agents, having reliable and secure access is the only way new services
can be rolled out faster. It should also help in improving customer relations,
reducing risks and costs. In the events of mergers and acquisitions, new locations
and employees can be added to the system without the need to set up duplicate
infrastructure.
The traditional approach to deploying applications remotely in most of these
industries requires companies to spend inordinately amounts of money and high
levels of IT staff time, detailed implementation schedules and an unwanted delay
before the solution starts to pay for itself. A better solution is to configure,
manage and enable applications access from one centralised location, which can
dramatically reducing the cost of provisioning for each branch office. With
a 30-minute installation time to connect the office over the network to the
central servers, nothing can be faster.
Issues
When information is accessed from a remote location, network bandwidth can be
a problem. A server-based solution, which keeps application processing on the
server, minimises the demand for bandwidth, which helps reduce network and telecommunication
costs too. Typically, overall costs of managing government databases are so
huge that their costs can be significantly reduced by savings in telecommunication
costs. When remote connectivity solutions are required by the government, one
of the key concerns is the security of citizen data. At the same time, the challenge
for the vendor is that the solution should be enabled to authorise and secure
information and access sharing among different government agencies too. It should
make sure that the data is not accessible to let others keep an eye on citizens
without proper authorisation.
To use a MIS manager’s language, the complexities of the network need to
be centralised, while the ease of use should be distributed throughout the network.
That is the ideal way in which technology can be implemented for business and
for the people who run the business.
The author is managing director of Citrix Systems India
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