In response to a tough economy, many companies are choosing to cut capital and operating costs by consolidating branch offices. Others are consolidating offices due to a merger or acquisition. In either case, consolidating offices without a plan for adapting your IT infrastructure can get complicated and expensive. It can also diminish your potential savings along with employee productivity.

Here’s a potential scenario: You consolidate your branches. Fewer offices are suddenly supporting more workers and data, taxing your IT systems and IT staff. You’re forced to integrate a mountain of IT equipment of various ages, makes and models. You are also trying to process and store too much data with too little disk space. The inconsistent security practices at various branches create a lack of cohesion between your new offices. You don’t have the IT staff or expertise to figure out how to make everything work together.

But all hope isn’t lost. The key to a smooth consolidation is implementing consistency across your IT infrastructure. That requires you to make some strategic changes.

Here are some ideas you should consider to help ensure your branch office consolidation does what it’s supposed to do – save you money and increase productivity.

When branch offices consolidate, it isn’t just workers that increase at a single site. Servers and desktops come along with them. That leaves IT administrators with an abundance of equipment to integrate, some of which may be outdated or incompatible. With more workers to support at a single site, you could need equipment and capabilities that you didn’t need before.

It may seem counterintuitive to invest in new equipment when you’re trying to reduce your expenditures via consolidation. For example, consider a small branch office that previously relied on a peer-to-peer network with a VPN connection to access files at the main office. Increased WAN traffic resulting from more workers using the network can cause login problems and slower access to critical data.

A consolidation presents the perfect opportunity to invest in a branch server running Microsoft Windows Server 2008. You’ll have secure and efficient onsite storage, faster file access and faster and more secure logins. Your critical data is more accessible, and the branch server’s contents can be replicated onto your main office’s servers for additional data protection. A Web-managed switch allows you to remotely manage the network, without having an IT administrator onsite.

Larger branch offices that have multiple servers may find that they suddenly have too much equipment to manage and too few IT staff to do it. You could also be stuck integrating a large group of unrelated servers that aren't designed to work together. This can cause big headaches and diminish your productivity.

Consolidating your servers or upgrading to a blade environment reduces the number of physical IT assets you need to manage. You’ll spend less time and cost on maintenance, while improving your system performance and storage flexibility. Virtualisation adds more efficiency because you don’t have to dedicate individual servers to applications, freeing them up for other uses.

These solutions also come with the benefit of remote management capabilities. This can reduce the need for time-consuming on-site visits and makes branch office data backups easy. Automated alerts help you identify problems and fix them before they result in downtime.

With new users come more data. This means you could be facing a shortage of disk space. Your existing environment may not be set up to handle a sudden increase in demand. Or it may lack the flexibility to easily re-allocate disk space based on changing needs. Either scenario adds up to extra time and effort managing your storage.

Implementing a shared storage solution can give you the critical capacity and flexibility you need. Shared storage allows you to eliminate dedicated file and print servers and avoid wasted disk space resulting from server upgrades. You can also implement centralised data protection schemes, including replication to corporate headquarters to safeguard against data loss. With an easy-to-use single interface, IT administrators can manage storage faster and they don’t need specialised skills to do it.

HP has developed comprehensive branch office consolidation solutions specifically for small, midsize and regional branch offices. Whether you’re worried about servers, storage, networking, data security or all of the above, HP can assess your needs and recommend solutions designed to work together. Implement your consolidation faster and at a lower upfront cost, while boosting employee productivity to sharpen your competitive edge.

For more information on HP’s comprehensive branch office consolidation solutions, download the solution guide (680KB, PDF).