* Network efficiency, productivity, and community
Almost every week, we write about how to make the most effective use of your WAN and the topics often center on how to keep unauthorized traffic off your network. For instance, we recently wrote about whether it’s a good idea and/or possible to block traffic in certain ports, especially with the ability of applications like Skype to find a way though most firewalls and application performance appliances.
Today, we’d like to take a moment to consider to what extent tight control is possible – or even desirable. For instance, recently reports in the popular press focused on lost productivity from employees accessing their “fantasy football” accounts while at work, reporting that many people spend up to an hour a day – while allegedly “at work” – managing their teams. And there seems to be virtually no way to stop personal e-mails at work. Even if corporate e-mail is used for work purposes only, Web-based access to services like Google’s Gmail make it almost impossible to stop access to e-mail services.
So the basic question becomes to what extent it is reasonable to try to curtail this use – or possible abuse – of corporate resources with technology? Yes, we can – and should – continue to use various devices for traffic shaping and to ensure that sufficient bandwidth is available for mission critical applications and that personal communications do not cause a bottleneck. At the same time, perhaps this is best addressed with a combination of technology and policy, after all, with increasing bandwidth and lower bandwidth costs the strain of corporate networks is becoming more and more a productivity issue than a corporate bandwidth issue. And while policy can’t always be strictly enforced, there at least is a baseline expectation as to what is and isn’t acceptable network use.
So we’d like to hear from you on this. Do you have an acceptable network use policy in your organization? Are there strict limits as to how many hours per day may be spent on personal communications? If so, how are these policies enforced?
Let us hear from you, and we’ll be sharing the results.
