In my previous two posts, I’ve covered branch office solutions including the SBA and the alternatives. No discussion on branch offices could be called complete without including hybrid environments.

The hybrid conversation is the same as on-prem when your user is homed on-prem and not online. As soon as your user is homed online, you have two seperate considerations

1. User connectivity to the Cloud for all functions but PSTN
2. Cloud connectivity to Cloud Connector Edition (CCE), Direct Routing (DR), or On-Premises Call Handling (OPCH)

For the first point, local Internet is what Microsoft recommends. Recall from earlier posts that you can use your router/firewall to direct O365 traffic out locally, and send all other traffic across a WAN, if that’s what your organization requires. If this Internet connection fails, your options are to route across the WAN, a 2nd Internet connection, mobile clients with LTE, or head elsewhere to work.

For the second point, things can get a bit more complex. The routing and high-availability of CCE, OPCH, and DR varies. Other factors will be centralized PSTN breakout vs a more localized approach – you’re more likely to have a business class or redundant connection for a centralized service than if you have distributed services.

Cloud Branches

One common solution that I see a lot of, is a hybrid scenario with branch office users hosted online, and main office users hosted in the on-prem pools. This eliminates the cost and administrative overhead of running branch office solutions, while keeping some infrastructure around for financial, compliance, interoperability with other services/devices and other reasons. Cloud-homed branches are also a great stepping off point when you’re moving a larger organization to a pure online environment.

Pure Cloud Considerations

At this point it shouldn’t be surprising to you that there really aren’t any new or unique considerations for branch offices when your entire organization is cloud based. From a branch office perspective, there’s no local infrastructure different versus hybrid scenarios.

Edge Cases and Wrap-up

In the past couple of posts, I’ve covered branch office considerations for high-availability. The range from SBAs, redundant WANs, redundant Internet, full pools, and more. While comprehensive, I didn’t cover every use case. When considering the solutions that best apply to you, draw up a simplified map of your environment, get a bunch of copies of it, and have at them with a red pen to indicate failure points. Work through these outages using your most important use cases to establish what works, what’s limited or hobbled, and what’s entirely broken. If a scenario doesn’t work for your use cases, put it aside.

You’ll now have two piles – works for me, and doesn’t work for me. Next, review the scenarios that do work, and establish which one best fits your business needs, including pricing. If the mighty dollar sign knocks all of these scenarios out of contention, you now need to sort through the “doesn’t work” scenarios, and work through them to find “the best of the worst” that does the best job of fitting your business needs and budget.