Cyber Monday, the online companion to Black Friday, is the Monday after Thanksgiving, when retailers slash prices for online purchasing. But with most people back to work by Monday, it’s expected that they will do most Cyber Monday purchasing while on the clock, and on the corporate network.
With 88 percent of retailers offering aggressive online discounts on Cyber Monday, the National Retail Federation predicted that more than 70 million Americans were expected to shop online from work this year.
To survey the anticipated impact of Cyber Monday on corporate networks, Ipswitch Inc.’s Network Management Division created an online poll on its company Website, which asked: “How much additional bandwidth do you expect your employees to consume on Cyber Monday?”
The poll went live on November 15, and votes were collected up until the morning of November 29, 2010.
Of those polled:
- More than 50 percent of IT administrators expected to lose more than 20 percent of their company’s network bandwidth from employees shopping on the job during Cyber Monday.
- 17.6 percent percent expected to lose between 10 percent and 20 percent of their network bandwidth.
- 28.5 percent expected to lose less than 10 percent of their network bandwidth.
Ennio Carboni, President of Ipswitch Inc.’s Network Management division, offered the following tips for IT solution providers to help their customers protect network bandwidth use on future Cyber Mondays and other peak usage days:
1)††††† Use network monitoring and management tools to track network traffic flows during work hours. Looking at where network traffic is going and analyzing “spikes” in network usage can help you determine specific times and areas of your customer’s network that may be most vulnerable during heavy usage.
2)††††† Analyze the bandwidth required to support critical business operations (such as financial databases, CRM software, or the company’s email and VoIP platforms) and take steps to make sure that bandwidth is prioritized or reserved to always support those business-critical applications first. Utilize bandwidth provisioning and/or rate limiting features in routers and switches to make sure that the most important applications get top priority while employee Internet access is assigned a lower priority.
3)††††† Help your customers create an Acceptable Use Policy regarding personal Internet use during work hours. You don’t want to completely block Internet access for employees, but you should help put a policy in writing that sets realistic limits on Internet use and explains the security concerns and other reasons for the policy. Work closely with your customers’ HR and IT departments to create a policy that works best for everyone, and get employee input on the policy before you put it in place.
