An average of over 50% of enterprise employees are based at branch offices (remote sites, job sites, stores, manufacturing plants, etc.), meaning that if branch applications don’t perform, branch workers can’t work and business is lost with direct impacts to the top and bottom line. Branch offices, remote locations and store fronts are critical for local customer engagement, but they require IT staff to support many islands of infrastructure that are costly and inefficient to maintain and yet necessary to meet local performance and reliability needs. Today, 50% of company data and intellectual property still lives outside the data center, leaving it unprotected, open to compromise and data breaches. Backup processes are cumbersome and data recovery is time-consuming or even futile without qualified IT staff at most branches, not to mention the challenges of provisioning new services or applications in an agile world. These activities, and others that support branch IT operations, consume 50% of IT budgets.