The Recreational Traffic Impact

I've been working in Network Management for almost 10 years and there has always been an impact of recreational traffic on business networks. 10 years ago Peer 2 Peer applications like Napster flooded the Internet with huge amounts of traffic and many business had to quickly react with control methods or policies restricting or controlling the impact of this traffic. It was fairly easy to do because most P2P traffic was illegal, so a policy restricting it was pretty easy to implement and enforce.

Today, applications like YouTube(TM), Facebook(TM) and MySpace(TM) pose a whole new challenge. The latest workforce generation has adopted these social media applications as the standard and common form of communication. Taking away Facebook is the equivalent of taking away their access to food and water, not good for health or business. So how can companies ensure that Facebook and YouTube are not impacting the performance of the business?

Policies and procedures can help, but only as much as the enforcement, and you risk alienating the new workforce. Traditional web filters and network shaping solutions can be part of the solution, but are often reactive and only provide value if they can properly classify the traffic.

At Vineyard Networks we're starting by providing visibility into the network utilization at the application level, but even I'll admit that this is an evolving market with evolving demands and requirements. As hundreds, even thousands, of new social media applications storm the market we are going to see a new evolution of solutions to manage and maintain network and application performance, and I'm very excited to be in the game.