I have had great opportunities over the past 12 years to work with a variety of different flavors of IT Departments and their personal / business preferences on how to manage their data in respect to branch office locations. To Centralize or Decentralize remote data has always seemed to be the question people ask me when consulting on best practices. I wish I could say that one way always outweighs the other but the truth of the matter is that you have to take each one into account, looking at what value it can poses as well as the potential pit falls you may encounter. In both cases I have seen them work successfully as well as fail to deliver what the business owners were trying to achieve. Below I am going to give you the Pros and Cons of each and hopefully you will have a better understanding on how they can affect your business.

Centralization:

To centralize your data means to assign one physical location to house your servers and storage devices and allow remote connections over a secured line such as a VPN into your network to access applications and databases.

Pros:

1.     Data resides in a single location

2.     On Site IT Management at the remote locations can be reduced

3.     Nightly Back-Ups can be done easily with a higher fault tolerance

4.     Securing a single environment is easier to manager allowing fewer administrator access to application and storage servers

5.     SPOA or Single Point of Authentication, if an employee is let go but still has access to their desk the local server has a higher risk of attack due to replication limitations on the domain tree, about 15 minutes. With the Single Point of Authentication user in unable to log into the remote server immediately.

Cons:

1.       WAN Uptime crucial to allow remote connections

2.       Expensive Dedicated Bandwidth lines and WAN Optimization tools needed to be in place to ease congestion

3.       Higher Security risk due to information being passed over the Internet, MPLS (Multi Protocol Label Switching) helps but is a lot more expensive then ipSEC.

4.       Potential Cyber attacks to unsecured servers through VPN

5.       Potential Virus Attacks can affect Branch of Main Office, no containment without disruption of productivity

Decentralization:

To decentralize your data means to install remote servers at each branch location, this may be application, file and storage servers creating individual networks that can run independently if necessary.

Pros:

1.       Data resides at Branch Location for employee to have access to at all times

2.       WAN connectivity not as crucial due to localization of data

3.       Virus attacks can be contained to a single location

4.       If branch server goes down no other branch or main office is affected

5.       Data misplacement not as crucial since all data contained is from single branch location

Cons:

1.       Higher IT Management Costs due to multi-point inspections

2.       Single Point Back Ups more likely to fail to do WAN Connection

3.       Branch Domain Controller potentially higher risk of disgruntled employee attack through replication latency

4.       Higher Cost of running branch servers includes not only the hardware but storage and security costs

5.       Higher overhead of service, patching, support can prove to be higher than Dedicated Internet lines and centralizing the data