Businesses can spend substantial amounts on network performance management - analyzing usage patterns, designing proper architecture and evaluating its impact. However, these carefully designed systems quickly become redundant when traffic that is unexpected, unsolicited or unwanted begins to sap bandwidth. No company wants excessive time and money wasted on private surfing. The first step to improving your performance is assessing your current usage. Network performance monitoring is a critical first step towards being able to resolve user complaints, do impact analysis of new systems, and make capacity plans. It is also extremely useful in understanding and resolving common loads on a network, including unsolicited or unnecessary traffic, as well as rogue items.
Numerous studies have been done on the effect of free, unmonitored internet access on employee performance, all with differing results. One study showed that private surfing in a 1000-employee company could cost up to 20 million GBP per year, with as much as 59% of web surfing that is done on company time not being company related. Other studies show 30-40% of productivity lost through private surfing, with up to 4 hours a day being used for non-business related browsing, and up to 2 hours per day of this being used for email, either company or private related. Just one employee streaming a particular webcast can use up as much bandwidth as downloading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica onto a business PC. The statistics are endless. If network performance monitoring reveals that private surfing is a significant problem for your company, information technology consultants can advise of the best ways to overcome the problem. Software based Asian IT solutions are becoming more popular, but network architecture can also be restructured to make private surfing more time consuming and less enjoyable.
The statistics make for some frightening translations to your organization's bottom line. However, even more worrying is the lack of visibility that most businesses without expert IT consulting services have of the problem. One example of how business computing can be affected comes from a popular free downloadable application, Skype. To guarantee acceptable voice quality during VOIP calls, Skype sets the Type Of Service field to the highest priority for its traffic, in a network situation. Personal Skype calls will then take precedence in the network over more critical tasks, for example, data sessions to a company ERP system. The impact on your network performance management can be huge.
However, knowledge of the impact of unsolicited traffic on your business network is power. Most businesses lack even the fundamental tools for dealing with network performance issues like this. While information technology consultants are useful for some steps towards resolving the problem, many solutions can be initiated internally. Company policies are a necessary first action towards tackling the problem, while gaining visibility of the extent of the problem, and then initiating controls follow naturally.
An even greater threat and concern to business is the network load and security issues that rogue traffic, such as spam and content-rich popups create. Worms, denial of service attacks and viruses are frequently invisible to ordinary computer users, but can cause poor performance with no reason discernible to anyone other than trained IT consultants. Addressing these rogue traffic issues is also critical to maintaining and optimizing your network.
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