Is your network ready for the Olympics?

By Nigel Hawthorn, VP EMEA Marketing, Blue Coat Systems

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games promise online access like no other. For the first time in history, viewers can have 24/7 coverage of Olympic events, in many cases without delay and without a broadcast television network deciding what you watch and when. Through the Internet, viewers get instant access to the events they want to see.

All around the world, television networks are offering considerable coverage online. The BBC will offer multiple online “channels” of event coverage, plus a blog and behind-the-scenes videos. Other broadcasters throughout Europe, Asia and around the world plan to offer online live and on-demand video coverage and other content in unprecedented ways. China Central Television (CCTV) plans on originating high-definition video feeds and make them available through multiple sites, including its own. The amount of online video will be staggering.

Enterprises and organisations are bracing themselves for demands on their networks and Internet gateways that are potentially orders of magnitude greater than anything in the past. Will a company’s Internet gateways—it’s lifeline to the Internet—be dominated by employees accessing online video coverage of the Olympic Games? Will fragile Wide Area Network (WAN) links to branch offices be subsumed by the Olympics so that internal business traffic is impaired? A recent poll of Chief Information Officers, conducted by Blue Coat Systems, showed that 95 percent regarded Internet-delivered Olympics video as one of their top concerns. Never before has an Internet event so threatened the viable functioning of enterprise and organisational networks.

With some video streams or downloads offering high-quality, high-definition video, each employee accessing such content could be consuming as much as 1.4 megabits per seconds of Internet gateway or network bandwidth. With average corporate Internet gateway bandwidth capacity ranging from 1.5 megabits per second to 20 megabits per second, it will not take many employees watching Olympics video at work to completely dominate the Internet gateway. Anywhere from one to 14 employees watching Olympics coverage at the same time could saturate the gateway so that nothing else could get through. A single T1 connection to the Internet offers 1.544 megabits per second of bandwidth—one person watching video could use the whole thing. An E1 connection offers 2.048 megabits per second and would not fare much better. Employees watching multiple video streams at the same time make this impact even greater.

Enterprises and organisations also worry about a drain on employee productivity, as workers turn to the Web for Olympic coverage during work hours.

What’s a company to do?

Some of the concerns for enterprises and organisations in managing Olympics content from the Web:

• Ensuring that the company’s Internet gateway is fully available for business use of the Internet, rather than overwhelmed by Olympics video

• Ensuring that the WAN links to branch offices are fully available for business use rather than overwhelmed by Olympics video from the company’s main Internet connection point

• Managing employee productivity, so that they are not spending a large amount of time watching the Olympics while at work

There are multiple approaches towards solving these challenges and goals:

▪ Block Web access to all known Olympics sites known to offer video

Issue: Can you afford to block major news sites; can you find all of the sites to block?

▪ Block all streaming video

Issue: in the process of blocking all streaming video, you may be preventing content that is important to certain employees or departments; also blocking streaming video would only curtail some of the video, as much of it would be video embedded in the HTTP stream (progressive downloads of Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight)

▪ Block all video embedded in the HTTP stream (progressive downloads of Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight)

Issue: do you have the solution or technology to block Web traffic in such a granular way? Will you end up blocking content that is important to certain employees or departments? How do you decide what is acceptable/business-productive and what is not?

▪ Allow streaming or embedded video or content, but not during business hours, or allow only during lunch and after hours

Issue: This is a less “Draconian” approach that will make employees a bit happier but still potentially impacts business operations during lunch or after regular local working hours.

▪ Allow video content, but limit the amount of bandwidth it can consume

Issue: This approach requires a detailed understanding of applications and the ability to categorise URLs in multiple ways along with the ability to manage bandwidth with fine-grained control. It can provide a compromise to employees’ desire for recreational use of the Internet and an organisation’s business operations, satisfying both or creating frustrations, depending on how it is conducted.

▪ Use intermediary warning or “coaching” pages to let employees decide if accessing content in question is appropriate at a particular time

Issue: This approach empowers employees and also “trains” them, but its effectiveness is limited by the willingness of employees to “do the right thing” for the company and by their understanding of how their Internet activity might affect overall capacity, particularly in light of what other employees are doing. This approach could also be combined with bandwidth management to limit certain video under certain parameters.

▪ Allow video content, but minimise the load on the Internet gateway or branch office by caching locally through a proxy appliance

Issue: This approach will make employees happier and will not inadvertently impact access of business-related video or content on Websites. Storing or “caching” content locally can dramatically lessen the impact on the Internet gateway or WAN link for a company, since the content only has to cross the gateway or WAN link once rather than each time it is requested by an employee. This approach necessitates the ability to cache various forms of video, including progressive downloads of Flash or Silverlight.

One of the most critical areas for the effects of employees turning to the Web for Olympic Games coverage is branch offices. Since most enterprises and organisations “backhaul” inbound and outbound Internet traffic from branch offices to a centralised data centre or regional or corporate headquarters location, the added load of Olympic Games video could swamp the WAN links to branch offices, making business-critical applications and communication exceedingly slow or completely non-functional. 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. Extensive video access could exacerbate this situation.