Communications aspects of intercontinental deployment of enterprise wide applications

Using telecommunication networks and shared databases, modern enterprises may deploy the applications that will hold the operations fabric of their enterprises together and improve their worldwide competitiveness. Enterprise-wide applications deployment is a complex systems integration project, even in cases of single-country deployment, because the computing platforms, databases, applications, and communications infrastructure have to be planned and deployed in concert with each other. When the regional and corporate headquarters are on different continents, network planners, data processing (DP) personnel, and executive management alike find themselves dealing with this multidiscipline problem complicated by multicontinental logistics. We consider a number of technical architecture options for the enterprise-wide applications deployment of intercontinental multisite operations and qualify them in terms of their feasibility, technical risks, capital and operation costs, and user satisfaction. We also address the spongy keyboard problem, a condition that may make centralized solutions unsuitable for intercontinental deployment. In choosing the technical architecture to support enterprise-wide applications, we consider the following options: centralized processing, autonomous processing with centralized batch consolidation, regionalized processing with ongoing centralized consolidation, and regionalized processing with global distributed consolidation.