Verizon Business has expanded its managed services to extend heaquarters’ capabilities to retail stores and branch offices without the need for local IT support. That’s important, according to the company, given that branches now consume up to 70 percent of enterprise IT resources.

    Chip Freund, director of managed services product marketing, says this offer makes Verizon Business the first company to wrap a managed service offer – including dedicated access, VPNs or of other connectivity options along with various value-added services – around the Cisco Systems Inc. Integrated Services Router (ISR).

    The ISR enables Verizon Business to provide branch offices with any or all of the below options:

    •Content (URL) filtering, which enables companies to set policies governing user access to approved internal and external Web sites.

    •Zone-based firewalls, which offers customers the ability to create security zones within the branch network to enable controlled access to sensitive information assets and protect the branch network from outside threats.

    •Intrusion prevention service, which uses pre-defined signature files to scan Web traffic for worms, viruses and other Internet borne threats, and implement corrective actions to protect the branch network.

    •Content delivery, which is a caching service that stores frequently requested Web content locally, freeing branch bandwidth for business-critical applications.

    •EthernetLAN,which offers the ability to extend the reach of branch LANs without the need to deploy separate switches.