Branch offices are the growth engines of today's enterprises. So when you consider that, on average, more than 50% of an organizations employees are located in branch offices, nearly 50% of corporate data resides in them, and 50% of IT dollars are spent powering them, the overhead and investments seem reasonable.

But while branch offices and other remote sites are critical for productivity and revenue generation, they're also a giant headache for IT to manage.

Why? Because all of that data is often in high-risk places and subject to loss, and backups are expensive, time consuming, and inefficient. Same goes with provisioning new physical servers and sites or restoring offices if downtime occurs. And lastly, think of the people in these branches. Few of them are skilled IT pros who can actually help keep branch applications and services in tiptop shape.

Spending all of this time, money, end effort managing branch IT makes you wonder if there's a better solution. Good news there is. And with today's launch of Riverbed SteelFusion 4.0, we can simply take a look at something were all quite familiar with to figure it out: our smartphones.