Research Report: Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends
ESG Research Report

Jul 12, 2011
In order to determine the IT priorities and challenges currently faced by remote office/branch office (ROBO) locations, and how organizations plan to address those challenges, ESG recently surveyed 454 North American senior IT professionals representing midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations. All respondents worked at headquarters locations or other centralized corporate sites and were responsible for ROBO IT operations and/or strategy, including the delivery of IT services to these locations, authorization of expenditures, or establishment and enforcement of corporate IT policies for remote/branch offices. Respondent organizations were required to have at least two ROBO locations to qualify for the survey.
The survey was designed to answer the following questions:
  • How many ROBO locations do organizations currently support?
  • What is the average number of employees that work at each ROBO location? What is the largest ROBO in terms of number of employees?
  • What percentage of ROBO locations has dedicated on-site IT staff? How do organizations determine which locations qualify for on-site resources?
  • What percentage of an organization’s total IT budget is dedicated to supporting ROBOs?
  • What are the top ROBO IT priorities? What are the top networking and security challenges when it comes to supporting the IT needs of remote/branch offices?
  • How are the majority of corporate applications and/or IT services delivered to users at ROBO locations?
  • What benefits do organizations derive from delivering corporate applications and/or IT services to its ROBO locations?
  • What challenges do organizations face in delivering corporate applications and/or IT services to its ROBO locations? What steps have they taken to address these challenges?
  • How many servers do organizations have deployed at a typical ROBO location? How does this vary by the average number of employees per ROBO?
  • How extensive is server virtualization usage at ROBO locations? What benefits has the technology yielded?
  • On average, approximately how much data storage capacity is deployed at the typical ROBO location? How does this vary by the server count or number of employees at the typical ROBO location?
  • What type of external disk storage system is the most widely used at ROBO locations? How does this vary by average ROBO storage capacity levels?
  • What is the primary data protection process organizations deploy at their ROBO locations?
  • For those organizations performing on-site backup operations at ROBOs, is disk or tape the preferred storage media? Who is typically responsible for backup operations and media management at these locations?
  • Do these organizations have any plans to centralize their backup processes? If yes, why?
  • For those organizations backing up their data to a central location, what drove them to this model and what challenges—if any—have they experienced?
Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.