Recreational video use at work is crashing company networks and starving business critical applications of the bandwidth they need.
While the online streaming of video from major sporting events such as the Soccer World Cup and Cricket World Cup has been a boon for sports mad employees, these events have been a nightmare for company computer networks.
The popularity of these events created enormous strain, starving mission-critical applications of their required bandwidth and in some cases, crashing networks entirely.
And it's not just sporting events viewed live online from work that's the problem. Employees can now download the latest episode of their favourite TV series, or view live footage of events from news websites.
And then there are the trailers of the latest movie, favourite music video clips and seemingly endless ways to waste work time.
The IT departments of larger organisations, or the local IT fix-it-guy, often gets the blame for sluggish networks, when in fact employees using video-streaming from sites such as YouTube or playing online games are the real culprits.
These types of sites and applications choke corporate networks, strangle productivity and can even open the network to security breaches. But many organisations are unaware that they are an issue.
Ignorance or malice
Whether intentional or non-intentional, misuse of a network still has the same devastating effects on an organisation.
The organisation's Internet gateway suffers, but so does their Wide Area Network (WAN), if Internet traffic is being backhauled to and from branch offices to a main Internet gateway at a headquarters location.
At best, it slows traffic flow and strangles performance. At worst, it can cause business-critical computer applications to come to a halt.
To employees, video abuse at work might seem harmless, but in fact it has security implications.
Cyber criminals are working overtime to try to take advantage of the millions of people who use video streaming, often embedding or implanting malicious code into innocent looking websites.
Sorting the wheat from chaff
Some companies depend on video and audio streaming and podcasts in order for the business to function.
Whether live or on-demand, internal video and streaming media are becoming important tools to train and educate employees - particularly those working remotely from the office.
But this requires a significant amount of bandwidth and can quickly consume WAN resources needed to support other essential apps. These applications can be a victim of limited bandwidth, and deliver a poor end-user experience.
WAN Application Delivery products can help managers set policies and improve the delivery of applications on the network. Limits can be set intelligently, to discern what usage is essential and what's not.
These products can also allow certain functionality, but restrict them to certain times of the day.
If your computer network is sluggish due to non-work related abuse, then applications critical to your business won't perform the way they should.
Some companies try to address this by buying more bandwidth, but that's not the answer.
Companies need to find a way to restrict employees to only the applications that are essential to the business, and to prioritise bandwidth to the applications that are business critical.
WAN Application Delivery infrastructure is beneficial for companies that have multiple offices, or a lot of employees that work out of the office.
It speeds up the applications that the business needs, and also prevents employees from introducing things to the network that slow it down or cause security issues.
WAN Application Delivery describes a family of intelligent hardware and software that is deployed at critical points throughout the enterprise - data centres, Internet gateways, branch offices, and even individual computers.
It is deployed wherever users need to communicate efficiently and securely with applications, inside or outside the organisation and helps accelerate business applications.
This helps to significantly improve application delivery to remote users, without requiring customers to make a trade-off between application performance and security.
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