The Olympics-craze and chasing app-network-appetite 

Nagendra Venkaswamy

The excitement around the world for 2016 Rio Olympics is unparalleled. Similar sentiment echoes in India as the country is cheering for its largest ever team of athletes this year, with more than 100 men and women participating in the major international multi-sport event.

The official broadcaster of the 2016 Olympic Games, Star India, has put out more than 3,000 hours of sporting action on television and its digital platform potentially making Rio the most watched Olympic Games in India’s history. We can bet that the millennial workforce will be catching all the action on their smartphones and pushing office Wi-Fi networks to their limits.

Here at Riverbed, we thought it would be interesting to survey companies globally to see how they plan to deal with the onslaught of network traffic driven by the Olympic Games and associated content. I’d like to share some of those results.

Overwhelmingly, 70 per cent of the companies surveyed said they would limit employees from accessing Olympic content through company networks, including Wi-Fi, in some way, with 24 per cent saying they will definitely limit content and 46 per cent saying they would probably limit content. Only five per cent stated they would definitely not limit their employees from watching games content at the office while 24 per cent said they would probably not place any limits.

I can imagine companies wanting to limit employees from watching the games for productivity reasons, however many IT departments are likely more concerned with preventing spikes in BYOD traffic from interfering with the performance of business applications: Less than half of the companies surveyed, 43 per cent, were very confident that their organizations could safeguard critical applications during high network traffic events such as the Olympics, while 12 per cent were not confident that their companies could handle the added strain and traffic.

In addition, the majority of companies, 85 per cent, reported that they were likely to more closely monitor the performance of their applications and networks, including Wi-Fi, specifically because of potential strain due to employees accessing Olympic content. Only two per cent stated that they were very unlikely to monitor any differently during this time.

Not surprisingly most companies expected employees to access Olympic content using the company’s networks, including Wi-Fi, via their desktops and laptops (48 per cent); followed by smartphones (34 per cent); and then tablets or other non-smartphone devices (18 per cent).

The number for smartphones accessing Olympic content will likely increase by the next games as Gartner research states that 70 per cent of mobile professionals will conduct their work on personal smart devices by 2018.

In the most revealing statistic, companies were asked if they had had an issue, even once, with their networks, including Wi-Fi, specifically because employees were accessing content during a popular event such as the Olympics. The majority of companies responded yes (69 per cent), with 30 per cent of these same companies saying that they have experienced more than one episode of issues.

So what can companies that have experienced issues from employees accessing content during a popular event such as the Olympics do? They can shore up their networks by doing the following:

• Implement real-time end-to-end monitoring for visibility into network and applications.

• Prioritize and optimize company network traffic while reserving bandwidth for business critical applications.

• Distinguish between company assets and BYOD. Allowing BYOD doesn't mean that employees can bring any device of their choice and be given unmitigated access to the corporate network.

• Team spirit is not just for the athletes competing in the Olympics: Bring siloed IT teams together to plan for any high-priority network events during this time.

• Provide employees TVs for viewing in common areas to ease load on network.

(Nagendra Venkaswamy is Vice President, India and SAARC, Riverbed. The views expressed here are of the author and CyberMedia does not necessarily endorse them.)