Our corporate HQ has a Commercial SQL Server 2008 Database. We have a production DB and a Reporting DB the Reporting DB is 1 day behind Production. There are several Regions in our company. Due to networking issues we are attempting to create a local copy of the Reporting DB. Which would be updated Nightly. My current position here is as the Data Analyst and it is my responsibility to recommend the best way to accomplish this.

I have a couple of questions about Merge Replication
1. If we use Merge Replication on the Production Database Can we eliminate the direct connection to the corporate production Database for our local staff.
2. What issues would we face attempting to do this?
3. what performance gains/losses should we expect.