Over the past 18 months, I've heard plenty of technology vendors talk about "solutions" for remote office/branch office (ROBO) and small office/home office (SOHO). Their pitches catalog the challenges ROBO and SOHO workers face trying to back up data, access corporate file servers, collaborate with co-workers and secure PC data. They're preaching to the choir.

I work from a home office, but for this article I'm going to play ROBO cop and assume that a remote-office employee is one who works in a branch office or from a home office. Like many other small- to medium-sized businesses, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) has a relatively small IT department, but we run email, CRM, Microsoft SharePoint and a few corporate file shares. When I moved in 2005 from ESG's corporate offices in Massachusetts to the heart of Silicon Valley, I didn't realize how much my productivity could be affected by being distant from the centralized, local IT infrastructure. Gone was the instant downloading of files to our network drive and backing up to a networked storage system over a fast LAN. Suddenly, I was responsible for my own data protection, and I had to deal with VPNs and Internet connectivity performance issues when getting files from the corporate file share.