Office surfers may face wipeout – Tech News – CNET.com
One network performance analyst at a Fortune 10 company estimated that 10 percent to 20 percent of all network traffic is nonwork-related. The analyst, who didn’t want to be named, said that can add up quickly.
“If you’re looking at a company with an $82 million IT budget, and 10 percent of the network is going to nonwork uses, you’re saving $8 million if you can stop it,” he said, adding that file-swapping, streaming news media, and gaming are among the most common activities.
This is easy to verify: monitor the network and see how much of it is being used throughout the day. Sure, there will be a ramp up at 9 AM, a spike a noon and then a downward slide at 4 PM, mirroring CNN’s inbound traffic (I wish these were stilll accessible).
But if the network isn’t constrained, how do you claim users are wasting bandwidth? You can make a case they’re wasting time, but that reflects badly on what passes for management. It’s always easier to blame external sites or those shiftless employees than the ones who are really responsible.