It’s that time of year again — the NCAA basketball tournament is upon us. This time of year always throws a spotlight on web filtering, as Enterprises are faced with the prospect of their employees frittering away time and valuable network bandwidth watching hoops.

The tools available on the Internet for following this year’s tournament are getting more varied and sophisticated, throwing open new security and bandwidth concerns, as well as raising the old specter of productivity problems.

Security

If you’re blocking your users from watching the tournament, then you’ve got to consider the ways that they might attempt to circumvent that policy. The key thing here is that video streaming isn’t just about web sites and media players anymore.

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On Tuesday, we took another step in broadening the Application Management functionality in our web filtering products. We released the first set of patterns for blocking network games, commonly called Massively Multi-Player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). We wrote patterns for World of Warcraft, Legend and the Steam Network, which is used by many games.

We also block a number of games through simple URL filtering. Some games rely on HTTP or HTTPS access to certain domains, so they can be shut down that way. Second Life and Lineage II are good examples of these.

There are two obvious issues with online games that should be of interest to enterprise and education IT departments: productivity and bandwidth. Cumulatively, online games have more than 16 million subscribers, with World of Warcraft alone accounting for more than 10 million of those subscribers. Blocking these applications at the gateway provides a simple, centralized way to prevent employees and students from violating what is undoubtedly already a part of your acceptable use policy.

This is the first expansion of application management in the R3000 beyond IM, P2P and proxies, leveraging a feature in the recently released 2.0.10 version of the R3000 that allows us to extend pattern coverage to any category. In the near future, we will be expanding the scope of our pattern blocking to include remote access applications like Terminal Services (RDP) and VNC, as well as streaming media protocols like RTSP.

Please submit requests for pattern coverage of other games and applications to mudcrawler [at] 8e6 [dot] com.