I have done some study on this. I believe that especially monitoring services can be done "online only".Monitoring in my book includes:- status (i.e. are devices/ports up/down);- performance (for example % bandwidth used on a WAN link).Also (re-)conf...

Is this a stand-alone network? I.e. not connected to the Internet or so?If so - it's fairly small, no need to create more than one OSPF area (assuming WAN connections have decent performance). Which basically boils down to enabling OSPF on all router...

One thing to add - VPN adds security to your connection over The Internet. Also quite important.