Advance warning to IT managers’ of potential World Cup nightmare

Following the first ever online only live streaming of the England football team’s 1-0 defeat at the hands of  Ukraine, Nigel Hawthorn of Blue Coat, thinks live online video streaming could have an adverse effect on organisations’ network infrastructures during next summer’s World Cup.

The 2010 World Cup in South Africa promises worldwide coverage like never before, with the BBC Sport website offering live video streaming of all matches. Though a small number of matches were shown online in 2006, next year the number of matches available across the web includes all matches that the BBC has the rights to. Probably more importantly, the success of the iPlayer and YouTube has led to an assumption on the part of users that the quality will be as good as TV.

At the risk of sounding like a World Cup party pooper, we need to consider the impact on the organisation and the network from the amount of bandwidth that will be eaten up by employees watching live 90-minute matches on their desktop PCs next summer. With no major time zone difference between the UK and South Africa, employees are also likely to be watching in prime office working hours (24 matches scheduled between Monday and Friday afternoons).

As workers turn to the Web for live match coverage during work hours, organisations should certainly be wary about a potential drain on employee performance and productivity, but press forward to protect against a greater threat – the impact on branch offices and applications. Usually individuals are blissfully unaware of the performance implications that continuous live streaming has on the company’s Internet gateway or WAN link that connects their branch office location to a corporate data centre or centralised Internet access point. The IT manager’s Internet gateway—their lifeline to the Internet— can quickly be fouled up by staff accessing live video streaming. In addition, slender WAN links to branch offices can be invaded by football fever so that internal business critical traffic is impaired.

Many organisations’ internet access is centralised and ‘backhauled’ inbound Internet traffic is delivered to branch offices over the WAN that links them to the data centre or headquarters. Therefore, the added load of multiple instances of a live match stream could swamp the WAN links to branch offices, making business-critical applications and communication exceedingly slow or stop completely.

Already these WAN links are under considerable strain, due in part to centralisation of servers and applications away from the branch office. Performance of remotely hosted applications and files is sluggish at best, requiring WAN optimisation solutions to compensate for burgeoning network limitations. Continuous video streaming of live match access will exacerbate this situation.

There are a number of different approaches that IT managers can take in order to ensure that their Internet gateway is fully available for business use of the Internet, rather than overwhelmed by online World Cup fever.

The World Cup only comes around once every four years and should be cherished. However, while we all want to keep abreast of all the latest action, organisations may want to stop and consider the impact next summer could have on their network resources and look at sensible ways in which to manage this down to an acceptable amount. Above all, whether it’s England vs. Brazil on a Wednesday at midday or Denmark vs. Ivory Coast Monday at 3pm, organisations must ensure that non-essential application traffic does not interfere with crucial business operations.

The full story will appear in the January 2010 issue of VitAL Magazine.