Amandeep Singh, Head Internet Business Solutions, Asia Pacific, Allied Telesyn
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Overview
Today's communication networks have evolved from simple data connectivity Architectures to business enablers supporting mission critical applications & processes. With increased need to share and consolidate information across Intranets to Extranets, the dependency on advanced communication infrastructures augments. With progressing times, lower cost of ownership and the simplicity of operations are becoming more and more critical for businesses to sustain.
Functional consolidation concepts revolve around building next generation elements which offer more functionality per equipment than traditional elements at no performance penalty. Branch-in-a-box is an extrapolation of the said concept which aims to consolidate disparate communication elements in a branch office onto one functional appliance.
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Branch-in-a-Box infrastructure consolidates various traditional branch office networking elements like routing, switching, HTTP/SMTP proxies, firewalls, Data encryptors, VPN concentrators, as well as VoIP gateways into one single functional hardware element, streamlining operations, reducing cost of ownership and easing solution maintenance.
Application Overview
As more and more business applications are deployed as client-sever architecture, there is a transition in terms of service expectations from customers. Today's demands are business availability rather than infrastructure availability. With mission critical applications driving businesses today, extreme infrastructure availability expectations are not unreasonable. The challenge the market faces today is to keep pace with the customers growing availability demands while still offering services competently.
With branches engineered to distribute elements and dedicated appliances to do routing, switching, fire-walling and encryption, the number of failure points increases subsequently at every extra distributed element integrated in the setup. As businesses link beyond their corporate to connect to their value chains expanding beyond geographical boundaries, networks spread to have a wide area of coverage with multiple branch offices connected through various media consolidating services at the central or corporate office. With each branch having different individual devices, it becomes challenging to manage, needless to mention the cost of implementation and support increases.
Branch-in-a-box limits the number of communication elements per branch to just one, thereby limiting the suspected failure elements to unity. Moreover, with these appliances consolidating communication functions, it becomes easy to port more and more value-driven features which aid the manageability or availability of the appliances contributing significantly to the overall benefits.
Allied Telesyn Advantage
Built to service branch office communication needs in totality, the Allied Telesyn range of branch-in-a-box appliances deliver Converged Data, Voice as well as IP Video access platforms offering Network Dynamism and Self-healing capabilities; scaling to support Network Sensitivity which allows the appliances to reconfigure themselves based on change of date, time, week-day, week-end, intrusion, device reachability or an event happening on the devices. Besides this pioneering initiative, there is also the inbuilt support to generate emails automatically against any set thresholds or failure level.
Business Proposition
As newer business avenues emerge, branch-in-a-box will find seeming applications across all market sectors, and the ones showing the most promise are Banking Finance & Insurance sectors, Travel Operations, Hospitality service reservation sectors, Manufacturing and Retail value-chain systems.
Business advantages to roll out in the due course of time will include ease of maintenance, high service availability, IP service consolidation, flexible connectivity media choice and Business Intelligence will trigger mass acceptance of Branch-in-a-box paving the way for the next level of technological evolution.
- By Amandeep Singh, Head Internet Business Solutions, Asia Pacific, Allied Telesyn |
