Network Performance Hit by Recreational Use

Formal Policies Fail to Combat Recreational Use of Network Resources

AUSTIN, Texas – June 26, 2007 – Recreational use of network resources is impacting network performance despite formal policies to restrict it, according to a survey conducted by network performance management specialist NetQoS® Inc. at its 2007 Customer Symposium.

The survey reveals that while nearly 90 percent of participants have a formal policy in place to limit recreational use (defined as non-business usage of network resources such as instant messaging, music/video downloads, social networking sites, and news/sports sites), it continues to rise and is now impacting the performance of business-critical applications on more than 60 percent of networks. The survey canvassed the views of more than 150 network engineers, managers and IT directors within large enterprises, strategic integrators, and government agencies who attended NetQoS’ annual network performance management technology conference.

“While focus in this area has typically been dedicated to employee productivity and IT security, recreational IT use and particularly the increasing popularity of bandwidth-heavy Web 2.0 services is now an important network management consideration,” explains Steve Harriman, vice president of marketing at NetQoS. “The network performance management information we provide our customers enables them to clearly identify this excess traffic, quantify its impact on network performance, and minimize its effect on business-critical applications. But as our survey shows, changing employee behavior is an entirely different challenge.”

Alongside growing recreational use, other trends causing performance issues include the increasing complexity and volume of application data, IT convergence, consolidation, and the rising number of remote users accessing the corporate network. Consequently, global organizations must have visibility into the key metrics necessary to quantify network and application performance. Without this visibility, it is difficult to monitor application service levels, troubleshoot problems quickly or mitigate the risk of planned changes and unexpected events.

“Today’s complex WAN traffic poses a real challenge for organizations. While there is no quick fix, the starting point is to identify the applications running on the network and measure their performance, as this allows delay-sensitive traffic to be prioritized and irrelevant applications to be controlled or eliminated,” said Dr. Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates and author of “The Handbook of Application Delivery.” “No matter what an organization’s policy on recreational use of IT resources states, network professionals still need the capability to manage WAN traffic to ensure optimal application delivery.”

Concludes Harriman: “While changing employee behavior is tough, imagine how difficult it must be for organizations that do not have 100 percent visibility into their network traffic. For those companies, the growth in recreational network use must be a nightmare, as they simply don’t have the information available to start addressing the problem.”

Further results:

  • Recreational use is consuming an increasing proportion of network bandwidth, with 73 percent of respondents saying that more than 10 percent of network capacity is consumed by employees’ recreational use
  • More than 50 percent of respondents have seen an increase in recreational use over the last year, with 55 percent of those people experiencing an increase of more than 25 percent
About NetQoS Inc.
NetQoS software and services help service providers, government agencies, and large enterprises – including half of the Fortune 100 – improve the delivery of applications over wide area networks by enabling them to monitor application service levels, troubleshoot problems quickly, and plan for change. Representative NetQoS customers include Chevron, Lockheed Martin, American Express, Hilton Hotels, Siemens, Boeing, Deutsche Telekom, NASA, and Barclays Global Investors. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NetQoS has R&D centers in Austin and Raleigh, N.C., and regional sales offices in London and Singapore. For more information, visit www.netqos.com or call (877) 835-9575.

NetQoS is a registered trademark of NetQoS Inc. All other trade names, trademarks, and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.