Having satellite offices can be a challenge for even well-staffed IT Departments. They must balance the needs of local workers with larger corporate goals around IT spending. And if your company has offices in multiple time zones, supporting your workers takes on an additional dimension of complexity as your IT department must extend their support hours.
With dispersed offices, IT support must stretch beyond an 8-hour day. Consider the following: what happens if you manage a central email server at your headquarters in New York and it crashes at 6pm Eastern Time, but you don’t have any IT staff to fix it until the morning? Depending on your industry, your New York office might notice a negligible amount of downtime; however, your Seattle office could lose 2-3 hours of productivity from loss of working email and still not be able to do anything until several hours into the next day. This could lead to a loss of email access for 12-15 hours, which can be the difference between landing, or keeping, an account and losing it.
You need to solve for these issues, but running servers in each office could require hiring a lot of extra IT staff. Not to mention the costs of additional equipment, extra office space for a second server closet, and all of the additional costs of maintaining servers on premises. There are many ways to solve for this issue, but the easiest and most efficient is likely to be moving your IT services to a cloud-hosted system.