The SMB and Branch Office ICT Infrastructure—Status Quo

Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) operate within limited budgets, yet increasingly need a sophisticated telecom (voice and data) and IT infrastructure to compete beyond their traditional markets. In fact, the capabilities of these infrastructures act as a leveler and enable SMBs, for the first time, to compete effectively against much larger and better-funded rivals. According to IDC (2008), over 70 percent of SMB executives believe that their information and communications technologies (ICT) infrastructure is essential to remain competitive.

So the question for both SMBs and Enterprise Branch Offices (EBOs), is how to reduce their ICT costs--both initial investments and on-going expenses (which make up over 80 percent of the costs)--and still leverage the significant telecom and IT capabilities that are increasingly necessary to give them a competitive edge? Clearly, doing business as usual with existing solutions is not the answer, and something radical is necessary.

The Current ICT Infrastructure and its Challenges

SMBs and Branch Offices (BOs) typically deploy discrete products to support voice/telephony, security/firewall, storage, routing, email/web/file servers, wireless access etc. These products are, more often than not, from different vendors and have different management and provisioning systems. Typically, anywhere between four and six different products are deployed in an SMB or a small branch office LAN. This can often create complexity and poor management.

This type of ICT infrastructure poses several challenges, which contribute to an increase in the total cost of ownership (TCO) for an SMB or an enterprise, including:

1.    High initial investment:  Since multiple devices are employed to deliver the different functionality, the initial product costs are fairly high. This can be a detriment to cash-strapped SMBs that may be reluctant to invest their often meager resources (typically less than 5 percent of their budget) on such an infrastructure. As a result, SMBs often end up with only a subset of the IT functionality necessary to be competitive.

2.    Significant effort in vendor management:  Having multiple products from different vendors entails a significant overhead in the vendor selection and procurement process. Further, the on-going effort required to maintain relationships with several vendors is overwhelming for even reasonably sized organizations.

3.    Costs of provisioning and set up:  A multi-product infrastructure will require substantial effort to ensure that all the different products inter-operate to deliver any of the services such as voice, email etc. The peculiarities of the different products require a fair amount of experience and knowledge in order to provision and often may require that the SMB purchase expensive installation services from a systems integrator (or a qualified value added reseller).

4.    On-going Maintenance and Management:  The complexity introduced by traditional ICT infrastructures often requires expensive IT support on an on-going basis, which SMBs can ill-afford. The different products--often separate devices, may have different performance, security, and protocol considerations, which may introduce operational challenges that cannot be managed without expert support, which is very expensive. In the case of branch offices, this may also mean that such support should be available locally at several locations, which further adds to the costs.

Having several devices also adds to the energy costs and the space required to support them.

5.    Performance:  Having several products/devices also usually means less than optimal performance (including reliability) across a service that is implemented using multiple products (for example VOIP using IP-PBX, an Ethernet switch, Security/Firewall etc).

Both physical and data security is an increasingly default requirement, and one that is undermined by the equipment diversity.

6.    High costs to upgrade and add new functionality/services:  Supporting several products, each with its own license/expiry/upgrade schedule, adds substantial effort to the upgrade process especially in a highly integrated environment. It increases the frequency of updates, possibly with attendant increase in downtime, as well as a significant increase in costs. In the case of branch offices, there often will be more visits necessary to the respective locations.

Most of the discrete products in an enterprise were built for specific applications and consequently, have little flexibility for any changes in other inter-operating products/devices. Having multiple devices that are independent in terms of development timelines can often prevent taking advantage of new feature functionality introduced in one product.

In addition to the above costs, there is the non-trivial matter of lost opportunity. Due to the costs incurred in maintaining the existing infrastructure and the inevitable focus on reducing the budget, investments in new enabling technologies are usually reduced.

The next-generation of SMBs and BOs will have to reduce the complexity and the costs of their ICT infrastructure rather significantly, while making available a broad swath of services. Further, the ICT infrastructure must provide robustness (especially important given its increasing mission-critical role) and should also scale quickly. In the branch office scenario, and SMBs with remote locations/users, performance is also a key metric of concern that should be addressed.

The Great Equalizer: Multi-Service Business Gateways

It should be fairly obvious that the multi-product approach must be addressed head-on given the significant complexity and TCO it entails. However, this does not mean simply combining the various functions into a single physical device. This mitigates the challenge only marginally and does not address issues of inherent complexity, scalability and manageability. A fresh approach is required that not only integrates the various functionality, but is also designed from the ground up to address the requirements of SMBs and EBOs.

A promising family of solutions is emerging, designed with the SMB and EBO requirements in mind, focusing on delivering sophisticated voice and data services very economically, securely and robustly. It is referred to variously as a Multi-Service Business Gateway (MSBG), Office-in-a-Box or Branch-in-a-Box. Basically, the MSBG is deployed at both at the SMB (or main office) as well as at the remote (branch office) locations. The definition of MSBG is not yet standardized, but there are some key characteristics that are present:

• Support Functions/Services

The exact set of functions and services that an MSBG should support is still being debated, but it is reasonable to assume that it will at least support common services such as VOIP, Security/VPN, Data and Access services. Web/Email servers, storage and wireless access points are some of the additional components frequently available in a MSBG. A sample offering is shown in Figure 2. With time, this list will invariably grow and will include business applications as well, such as CRM.  

• A Service Plane/Integration

This is a key differentiation from a simple box/product integration. The MSBG essentially integrates the different underlying functions that make up the service and presents this service orientation (while in essence hiding the functional components). This significantly reduces complexity and precludes the need for sophisticated and expensive IT help.

• Common Control & Management Plane

The MSBG has a common control and management plane across the various functions--in effect streamlining the provisioning, monitoring and management in general over a single MSBG or across multiple MSBGs simultaneously.

Common and standardized telephony and data interfaces are present.

• Fault-tolerance and Scalability

Since all--including mission critical applications/services--are running on a single physical platform typically, platform and application/service robustness is essential.

• Standards Based

The applications/services interfaces are standards-based so as to greatly streamline and simplify operations and support.

As the MSBG evolves, it will provide a platform for an increasing number of both networking and other non-networking business services. Given the breadth of functionality that it is expected to support, it is reasonable to assume that a collaborative model between platform and application vendors will emerge. Alternatively, the open-source model may be incorporated and augmented by MSBG platform vendors in an effort to provide a best of breed solution.

The MSBG should significantly reduce the complexity of the ICT infrastructure at an SMB and a Branch Office, thereby enabling them to focus on their core business while leveraging the benefits most economically. The initial investment is expected to be reduced by more than 60 percent and the on-going costs are a mere fraction of the multiple device scenarios (less than 20 percent is estimated). Such dramatic improvements in the TCO are sure to propel the MSBG as a key component in the next-generation SMB and Branch Office ICT infrastructure.

Abdul Kasim is vice president for Global Marketing & Business Development at Critical Links, Inc.