Aussie IT leaders: No streaming the Olympics in the office!

Nearly three quarters (73 per cent) of Australian companies plan to stop employees from streaming Olympic Games coverage on work networks, according to a survey.

A small global study by Wakefield Research for Riverbed Technology, found that this was the result of being burned in the past with 68 per cent of respondents admitting they had had an issue with their networks because employees were accessing content during a popular event.

A majority of Australian companies (79 per cent) will be closely monitor app and network performance during the Games, a figure the study linked to the reduced potential for IT teams to pinpoint and resolve performance issues of business critical applications during periods of very high traffic.

Globally, 12 per cent of respondents were not confident that their companies would be able to handle the added strain and traffic.

"As athletes prepare for the games, IT organisations need to prepare for the significant increase in network traffic that will occur as a result of employees accessing and streaming online content and applications, and the related increase in volatility of that network demand,” said Mike Sargent, senior vice president, SteelCentral at Riverbed.

Riverbed suggested businesses alleviate the potential strain by implementing real-time end-to-end monitoring, reserving bandwidth for business critical apps and supplying televisions for employees to watch the events on.