If you’re planning to watch the Rio 2016 Olympics at work, fair warning – your employer will likely be keeping a closer eye on your network usage than usual, if it doesn’t block you from watching altogether.
Companies around the world expect their networks will be impacted by employees accessing Olympics-related content, according to a new survey by Riverbed Technology. With the Rio 2016 Games starting Friday, 70% of surveyed companies plan to limit their employees’ ability to view Olympics content.
According to the survey data, 85% of companies said they are likely to monitor the performance of their wireline and Wi-Fi networks more closely during the Olympics. Nearly one quarter (24%) said they definitely plan to limit access to Olympic content, and another 46% said that they probably will.
“[Enterprises] do recognize that there could be some impacts from employees or customers or whoever else is using the network, accessing and viewing Olympic content: streaming live video, checking scores or schedules. They are expecting an increase in network usage and bandwidth consumption,” said Steve Brar, director of product marketing at Riverbed. Riverbed found that 42% of companies said they are very likely to monitor application and network performance more closely, and just 2% said they don’t plan to change their monitoring strategy.
The traffic increase might be enough to disrupt businesses’ networks or enterprise applications. Riverbed’s snapshot survey of about 400 enterprise information technology professionals from the U.S., Brazil, the U.K. and Australia showed that 69% of respondents have had at least one network issue in the past that was specifically due to employees accessing online content during large events such as the Olympics. Thirty percent said they’d had recurring issues during high-traffic events. Riverbed also found that less than half of the companies surveyed – only 43% – described themselves as “highly confident” that they could preserve critical applications’ operations during high network traffic events like the Olympics. Another 12% were “not confident” at all that they could do so.
“Companies still have concerns around providing unfettered access to some of this rich media content that may impact their networks,” Brar said. “While companies are getting smarter about anticipating demand from these type of events, we still hear about big events that cause application performance issues,” such as Black Friday and major product launches.
Brar also noted that technology has come a long way since the last summer Olympics four years ago, as has consumer demand for rich content and the maturity of social media.
Companies reported that they expect employees to primarily use desktops and laptops to access Olympic content (48%), followed by smartphones (38%) and tablets and other devices (18%). Notably, IT professionals in Brazil said they expected to see more smartphone access than any other type.
Riverbed offered a few tips for reducing network strain. The most practical and easiest is probably the suggestion to provide televisions in common areas so employees can watch the Olympics without using their own devices or otherwise straining the corporate network. The other tips included:
- Distinguish between company assets and bring-your-own-device assets, and limit access accordingly.
- Prioritize and optimize company traffic to reserve bandwidth for business-critical applications.
- Support IT planning for high-priority network events during the Olympics.
- Implement real-time, end-to-end monitoring to get visibility into the enterprise network and applications.
