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Remote offices and branch offices (ROBO)

A ROBO is an office located on a different site or in a geographical remote area from other offices of the same company or holding. Usually, there is a headquarters that acts as the main office. Several organizations have one (or more) main office, as well as remote offices in different cities, countries, or continents. Those organizations may have, in each remote office, some local IT infrastructure and assets, usually for data locality, but also to provide local services.

Considering the size of a remote office, it’s similar to a small company, because there are usually just a few servers running a few workloads to support local needs. So, they could be very similar to the SMB scenario described previously.

But in reality, if you look at the entire infrastructure, it’s more similar to an enterprise scenario, with big numbers (totally), full enterprise needs, and some specific challenges.

The distributed and remote nature of this infrastructure makes it a hard case to manage, difficult to protect, and costly to operate, for a variety of different reasons, as follows:

Limited IT budgets for each remote office, because having more remote offices acts as a multiplying factor for the total infrastructure costs.
Lack of local IT staff at remote sites, which results in increased service-level challenges for remote IT operations, such as provisioning and configuration of servers, maintenance updates, and troubleshooting.
Inconsistent host configurations at remote sites, which can complicate troubleshooting across a large number of remote sites.
Life cycle challenges for the infrastructure, due to the remote nature of servers that makes it more challenging to perform activities like upgrades and maintenance.
Limited business continuity solutions, or redundant hardware for remote sites, or in adequate backup software/hardware and/or system backup and recovery capabilities. Additionally, IT organizations do not perform comprehensive data recovery capability testing on a frequent basis.
Limited space at remote sites poses a challenge for accommodating new servers. In addition, existing physical hosts at these sites are not efficiently utilized.