Bandwidth is increasingly available and affordable for satellite, branch, and remote locations outside of headquarters. That’s good, because central IT is supporting a growing bevy of bandwidth-intense applications as it seeks to meet the needs of the distributed workforce.

A recent survey by IDG Research Services found wide support for bandwidth-intense employee activities in locations outside of headquarters. Mobile productivity applications are supported by 79% of those surveyed, video streaming by 78%, and audio streaming by 63%.

Data indicates that businesses see value in allowing workers to access video and audio streams that are generally thought of as consumer media. According to IDG Enterprise, video is increasingly a business-to-business medium, with most technology decision-makers saying they watch technology videos from a variety of sources, including vendor websites, YouTube channels, and tech content websites.

But these applications require bandwidth to ensure a quality experience. The IT decision managers in the survey indicated that they view upgrading bandwidth as the top solution for ensuring operational excellence while supporting an excellent employee experience at non-HQ locations.

These days, bandwidth is increasingly available at the right price. Affordable 1-gigabit business Internet is rolling out across the United States over existing infrastructure, making it easier to justify greater leeway in local offices where multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) is too costly and virtual private networks (VPNs) are often too perplexing for end users. That availability makes it compelling to explore software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) services for secure and fast networking. In fact, 50% of the respondents in the IDG Research Services survey indicated that they are already deploying software-defined networking technologies, including SD-WAN and network functions virtualization (NFV).

For more insights into the recent survey, read Outside HQ: Meeting The Bandwidth Challenge white paper.