The branch office is becoming a very important part of any business strategy. Remote offices and satellite arms of the company can provide coverage for service providers or outlets for retail corporations. In order to ensure that these offices have the most up-to-date information they need to be connected back to the headquarters via a Wide Area Network connection. However, modern branch offices are finding traditional WAN connections insufficient for their needs.
Modern branches have a highly mobile workforce. Gone are the days of static terminals and desktop machines. They have been replaced by applications that run on mobile devices and tablets and encourage workers to move around and engage with customers and build teams to accomplish goals. That team building also encourages the use of modern collaboration applications like Microsoft Skype for Business. Skype for Business has requirements to ensure smooth delivery of voice and video traffic to remote offices all over the world. Those requirements can challenge a traditional WAN and provide a subpar experience. And at the heart of all of these challenges the need for speed, security, and low cost keep cropping up to make decisions difficult.
HPE can help IT departments solve their WAN challenges. As traditional WAN technology transitions to a more hybrid approach, our solutions ensure that existing service provider solutions like MPLS circuits can be augmented with more inexpensive broadband services. This means that critical business traffic can have a dedicated path to your headquarters while other network traffic can use a faster, less costly path and not interfere. HPE FlexNetwork solutions also ensure that corporate traffic can be secured in transit to prevent loss of customer confidence and expensive data breaches.
HPE hybrid WAN solutions, such as the new MSR954 with dual cellular connectivity, can also provide reliable service for branches of any size. Think about the case of a large financial services company. A Midwest-based institution needed to ensure always-on connectivity for their ATM machines to conduct customer transactions. In remote use cases where IT resources are limited, they needed the ability to seamlessly failover to secondary and tertiary WAN options as troubleshooting is performed. With the ability to configure multiple diverse WAN connections, the MSR954 can ensure that an outage of one circuit does not cause your entire network to go offline. Critical traffic can be rerouted via broadband circuits or even via cellular uplink with the ability to provide dual connectivity with the system.
As your connectivity needs grow, HPE has the new MSR958 with 8 ports to provide significant flexibility for WAN circuit diversity and connecting additional systems to the corporate WAN. Both the MSR 954 and 958 are priced to help branch offices solve traditional network challenges and not break the bank.
All of this additional functionality doesn't have to come with added complexity for your IT management team. With HPE Intelligent Management Center (IMC) and the Branch Intelligent Management Software (BIMS) add-on, your central IT teams and manage and maintain branch devices as well as provisioning new devices without the need to send critical staff to the site to turn up new circuits. IMC and BIMS give you the power to be everywhere in the world to manage user expectations and solve issues before they become problems.
As the branch grows into a critical piece of your business, don't neglect the technology needed to help it succeed. Modern devices need fast, flexible, and secure connectivity. With HPE and the new MSR95X series solutions, you can ensure your WAN will meet current and future challenges with ease.