Sep 23 2008

Do You Wonder Why Corporate IT Blocks Your Web Activity?

Published by Ken Stewart at 11:45 pm under Business, Technology

We all enjoy a little time on the Web, browsing FriendFeed, Twitter, YouTube, or GMail. It’s only for a few minutes each day, right?

Did you ever wonder why IT blocks your access to these? Yeah, yeah… I’ve heard all the stories about how these services suck up a bunch of bandwidth, but this is optimized for the web. It can’t take up a lot of bandwidth, right?

Confession:

I must confess, I’ve been in IT for over a decade and thought about this along this same line. I really only limited streaming music. However, one of our network team was running some tests as to why bandwidth levels were so high.

He asked me, “Are you on Cosmopolitan?”

Doh, I love those top 10 quizzes… busted.

The Crime:

OverSeriously though, I usually keep GMail open, happened to have my FriendFeed account open, clicked on a Vimeo video, and popped up a funny post that happened to be on the Cosmo website.

We had removed the upper bandwidth throttling on our web proxy some time ago, and low and behold - I was consuming over 2.7 MBps of WAN bandwidth for a sustained 2-3 minutes. With a bonded T-1 allowing for approximately 3 MBps (1.544 MBps each), you can imagine this set off some alarms.

trafficOn top of that, it simply amazed me at how many raw port 80 (HTTP) connections were opened…

You can see that many of the links on the Cosmo site are blatantly advertising, and not all that uncommon. However, it was an eye-opener when confronted with how much data is being passed along those “tubes” every hour of every day.

Remediation:

Well, there are things we can most certainly put in place, at the risk of disrupting culture, a culture where high-capacity individuals get it done - so they should have the ability to goof of every now and again.

Well, not so fast. That is all well and good until incidental Web 2.0 usage interferes with the day-to-day business of serving our valued customers.

There are some hard and fast answers, but most cost time and/or money to manage. More importantly, this was not intended to open any discussions about which technology solutions are inferior/superior to another.

Instead, I wanted to share with you a small snippet of how one supposedly innocent use can dramatically impact business operations within your company, so cut your poor propeller-head a break now and again. I have operational stability and a finite budget to contend with as it is. That ranks a bit higher than me needing to check my latest FaceBook message.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. Ken is also the Director of Technology at Kearns Business Solutions.

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