With the advent of today's tech-equipped remote worker, the basic requirements for a remote office have changed. Perhaps like many of you, I have not had a physical office in many years.
After analyzing who I actually met with, I found an interesting result: Most meetings in my office include me and individuals to whom I was writing checks: In other words, vendors. My people, for many generations of my business, have been distributed in nature. Though physically disparate, they comprise a working unit, able to share information and take decisive action, regardless of location.
Possibly your business does not lend itself to this model. Let's assume you have a need for a remote location, a physical presence in a region. Given current technology, what do you need to meet minimum requirements, to support the business needs and the technology baseline of this remote or branch office?
One of my clients, a transportation company, has an advance location in the middle of the theme park area where it stages town cars, limousines, and buses. An important component of its management style is seeing what is actually happening in the drivers' break room. Cameras cover this nicely. IP cameras are inexpensive, easy to support, and viewable from a wide variety of devices. My client carriers a 4G-enabled tablet, allowing him to get a managerial audit of activity any time, any place. No one wants to get caught red-handed, especially if it is recorded on a DVR.
In the past the support services -- voice lines, fax lines, Internet, and printing -- were expensive and required an onsite IT presence. In the brave new world of cloud services, this is no longer the case.
Hosted PBX or cloud-based VoIP can provide extension level (2-digit) dialing between remote offices for a fraction of the historical cost. These voice services are carried across data infrastructure, allowing for an economy of scale. If the remote office is small enough, it can use a single 1FB1 business line, usually terminating at a fax machine. This line may be used for 911 services or alarm system monitoring, ensuring that emergency services get to the right place. Using remote VoIP for emergency services is a risky move. If the lines terminate at a home office, many miles away, there is a good chance the alarm will be responded to at the home office, not at the remote facility where the emergency is actually occurring.
If there is an area to make sure you spend your money well, it is with your edge data services. Access to the Web should be resilient and fast. Too often I see small branch offices with residential-class DSL. The service level agreement (SLA) tied to residential DSL never approaches the “five nines” of uptime you require to support your business office. Ensuring the circuit that supports the remote office carries static IP addresses, a good support model, and 24/7 live customer support is critical. This service mix will cost more, but it is worth it. A fast and reliable circuit allows you to leverage off-site or cloud services with confidence.
Local area networking (LAN) support for the remote office, a problem in past iterations of the remote office, has also changed. It is possible to support a small remote location (of five users) with fully wireless implementation. You can purchase a wireless edge device in conjunction with your data circuit, allowing for inclusive support as a by-product of this configuration. Many current level desktops ship with on board 802.x support (wireless). Truth be told, the majority of workers in your remote facility will probably use laptops that are, by design, mobile and therefore include wireless functionality. A few ports of hard-wired router/switching are traditionally included in the customer premise equipment (CPE) edge box you get from your telco or data provider. I recommend hard-wiring your production printer, and adding a wireless access point (WAP), should the square footage of the office space call for extended wireless.
Making a remote office happen is significantly less expensive than in the past. Infrastructure, support services, and even square footage costs have changed -- moving down in price. The only component that has not altered is the human element. People are expensive. Good people are more expensive but should be worth it.
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