Blue Coat Systems White Paper Sample

Competition for bandwidth originates between recreational traffic and business applications such as video conferencing, Web-based applications, file management systems and routine administrative and telephony traffic. P2P file sharing, in particular, is designed to be both aggressive and evasive, and bandwidth-hogging social networking sites can generate viral traffic spikes. The result is unpredictable bandwidth availability and network instability that compromise application performance and threaten an organization’s operating processes.

As an IT manager, you have to control the infrastructure that supports your organization without completely blocking recreational applications that have become an essential part of daily interaction. Where do you start?

The impact of recreational traffic
While most IT managers tolerate some recreational network usage, they often don’t know these applications can consume up to 60 to 70 percent of their WAN and Internet service links. That’s because content downloads, live video streams and file exchanges initiate several connections and consume large amounts of bandwidth for sustained periods of time. These aggressive types of applications can dominate business applications running over those same WAN and Internet links.