You are designing a WLAN for 50 branch offices that require central management. Which controller architecture do you use?

Per-branch local controllers require dedicated hardware and independent management at every site, which defeats the goal of central management across 50 branches.

Anchor controllers are used to anchor guest or roaming client sessions for mobility and guest access tunneling, not for managing branch office deployments.

FlexConnect allows APs at remote branch offices to be centrally managed by a single WLC at headquarters while also being capable of locally switching client traffic, eliminating the need for a dedicated controller at each branch. This architecture scales efficiently to dozens or hundreds of branches because all configuration, firmware, and policy management flows from one central controller. It is the purpose-built solution for the multi-branch, central-management use case described.

Autonomous APs operate independently with no controller and cannot be centrally managed, making them unsuitable for a 50-branch centrally managed WLAN.