The Superbowl fever is still on. It has the potential of putting the IT Administrator at the brink of a soup bowl. Statistics show that people love streaming Superbowl related videos, reading about it, discussing it and sharing videos about it including the Superbowl Ads. The best and the worst is set to make rounds on the Internet for at least 3 weeks from now. This is apart from a truck load of other shows ranging from 30 minutes to 3 hours that relate to the Superbowl. Feature programmes, expert commentaries, highlights from the previous years, analytical studies, star interviews and whatnot! According to a recent poll result, it has been found that online viewership of Superbowl after the event is over is twice as much as viewership during the event.
How does it matter to IT Professionals? Well, it does have a considerable amount on the working class in more than one way. Managers feel the pinch of mid-fiscal year pressure at this point of time and it is that time of the year where businesses generally soar. It is that time of the year where employees are almost a fortnight or a little more into the normal track after the holiday season and one would expect them to be highly productive so as to derive the best results.
During such a time, something as interesting as Superbowl could very well act as a factor that not only hampers employee productivity levels but also gallop mammoth amounts of bandwidth. With increasing options to view these videos in full HD and via streaming(both LIVE and on-demand) and the multitude of sharing options that are available through social networking sites, IT networks are all set to go for a toss for the next 2-3 weeks.
Your critical applications will need to take the pinch in terms of inadequate bandwidth availability and fight for mere survival when compared to those gluttony bandwidth eaters. This could impact your networks in many ways such as sluggishness, crashing of critical applications, increased response time, jittery VoIP calls and the direct effects of these would be rising levels of both employee and customer frustration levels. How does that predicament sound like? Definitely not music!
To avoid ending up in what we have termed the ‘Superbowl soup’, all you need to do is take control of your IT network before any of this happens. Using techniques such as QoS policing and bandwidth monitoring, you can keep a check on the bandwidth consumed for applications that are not very critical to your business. Superbowl is fun when watched on NBC or in the stadium but it isn’t quite fun when it eats too much of your network bandwidth and brings your day to day business to a standstill.
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer helps you fully achieve all of the above and gives you the necessary control on the network. You have everything from threshold based alerts to monitoring QoS to ensuring best class SLAs for your business VoIP, WAN RTT and video traffic. You could literally put the brakes on those streaming applications that eat your bandwidth and channelize them towards your business thereby achieving targets
Have all the fun but not at the cost of your business. The soup isn’t that tasty after all.
