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.

Peer-to-peer video streaming is in its infancy, but it’s definitely something to watch closely. The major player is Joost, which signed an agreement with CBS to broadcast all of the tournament games this year. While content providers like CBS hate YouTube et al because of copyright infringement concerns, they love Joost because of the ad streaming possibilities.

There’s also the Slingbox, which is a device that lets users stream video from the TiVo in their living room to anywhere on the Internet. Their promo even refers to watching your TV while your at work! Nice.

Then there’s the issue of vulnerabilities in the media players themselves. Attackers are always looking for new social engineering angles to lure users into clicking links and attachments. If you’re blocking the tournament, your users will be more apt to click through on a link in an unsolicited email promising unblocked access to NCAA video. That potentially gives the attacker an opportunity exploit browser and media player vulnerabilities.

If you’re not already, make sure that your desktop management folks are patching media players like Real Player and Windows Media Player.

Finally, there’s the problem of users going to proxies (which I’ve covered in depth on this blog before). If you’re not blocking those with a filter that does more than just URL blocking, then you’re toast.

Productivity/Bandwidth

The productivity issue is certainly real. The best illustration I can provide for this is a graph from Alexa. Alexa is a Neilsens’ style web traffic measurement service. Advertisers use it to determine which sites will provide the most bang for their buck.

This is a graph of web views (as a percentage of all web traffic) for a few of the top NCAA streaming domains over the last three years. The domains are sportsline.com (CBS), ncaasports.com and cstv.com.

Obviously, traffic to these sites jumps in March. But the key one to look at is sportsline.com, which is the CBS sports flagship and is among the most popular sports sites on the web. Their traffic basically triples.

And this graph doesn’t measure the bandwidth usage, just web page hits. Last year was the first year that ncaasports.com offered all the games streamed in real time. Watching live video is way more bandwidth intensive than refreshing the scores page every 10 seconds.

But I would argue that the productivity issue is no different than other major Internet-enabled sporting events. Note that in the graph above, you can see similar traffic jumps at March Madness time and during the NFL season, which is related to the popularity of Fantasy Football. (We have a separate category for Fantasy Sports, specifically to deal with that problem.)

Ultimately, when it comes to productivity, the only companies that will have a problem are the ones that don’t actively use their web filter to enforce their Acceptable Use Policies. In my experience, this is consistent across the 8e6 customer base. If you take the following steps, you will drastically reduce your problem:

1. Inform your users that you filter and monitor their Internet usage.
2. Tell your users whether or not following the NCAA tournament at work is ok, and if it’s ok, clearly spell out how much is too much.
3. Use the reporting features of your web filter to determine who is violating or abusing this policy and confront them (this implies that you are also authenticating your users).

Tags: bandwidth, March Madness, streaming

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 2:20 pm and is filed under P2P, Security Best Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.