NCAA Basketball 2015 Championship selections has already gathered the crowd. With almost every employee in an organization streaming live videos—IT and security admins are bracing for the heavy toll on their companies' networks. It is ​vital for all IT managers to ​handle severe traffic spikes on their networks by using these tips and act proactively to prevent​ network outages.

1. 10 Tips to Guard Your Network During
March Madness

2. NCAA fever is back!

3. Your enterprise network transports vital and sensitive information within the
company and beyond. Any disruption in availability or performance degradation
could spell serious damage to a company’s business and productivity. Every
company should be focused on vigilant monitoring of its network availability
and performance. If you haven’t already done so, harvest a rich set of tools
that provides your IT team with real-time visibility and analytics.
1. Monitor network for
availability or poor
performance.

4. At the end of the day, the primary purpose of your enterprise network is to boost productivity.
But often, the unauthorized usage of bandwidth-hungry personal applications impacts the
performance of applications that are critical to your business. Once you’ve got the right tools
installed, IT teams should start monitoring the network bandwidth traffic to optimize service
levels and identify which users and applications are eating up the most bandwidth.
2. Identify “Who” is
consuming your
bandwidth.

5. In order to keep employees happy, every organization needs to give some leeway for personal
usage of its network bandwidth. But keeping your team happy should never be at the cost of
bringing the entire network down! Solve this problem through alerts based on bandwidth usage
and identify bandwidth abuse before the situation spins out of control. Companies should really
take advantage of real-time alerts and business-hour filters to be notified about and fix problems as
they happen.
3. Apply the right IT
policy for network
use.

6. Do not let the network take all the blame for poor user experience. You also need to check on app
performance and identify unnecessary application traffic that could compromise mission-critical
applications. Assign the highest priority to critical apps such as CRM, corporate email, and client-
server based applications; and deprioritize second-tier business (and personal) apps such
YouTube videos and social media. You can also create IP groups to check utilization of sports
sites, online shopping sites, and others.
4. Assign the highest
priority to critical apps
and monitor app
traffic.

7. Don’t let your network slow down due to excess load. Instead, throttle down bandwidth
to smooth out the performance of your entire network. You should ensure that
business-critical apps are constantly up and running by monitoring bandwidth closely in
real time and shaping the traffic appropriately based on priority. The tool should be
able to allocate bandwidth percentage and classify the important traffic and thereby
verify the performance of these policies.
5. Allocate bandwidth
percentage to shape
up your traffic.

8. These days with everyone bringing their own devices (BYOD) and operating them on the
enterprise network, thus complicating bandwidth management. IT must have the power to take
control at any time and be able to regulate applications that run on any mobile device, whether
corporate or personally owned. So, your company requires tighter quality of service and the right
combination of policy and technology, to improve your users’ experience and lessen strain on the
network.
6. Control how BYOD
impacts your network.

9. Keep the bad guys out and protect your network against DDoS and zero-day attacks by quickly
initiating mitigation services before business is adversely affected. With BYOD, IT struggles to
track so many devices and account for all of them to identify attacks and block malicious IPs
without affecting legitimate transactions. Always choose a tool that can establish patterns and
detect anomalies proactively to avoid sudden shutdowns.
7. Fight against
malicious attacks and
anomalies.

10. What implications do changing usage habits have for how we design and build networks? Assess
the future of your rapidly changing IT requirements with capacity planning reports to make better
infrastructure investments today. Stay ahead of your network by quickly troubleshooting issues
with a tool that provides various, flexible reports on top users and application, and their real-time
bandwidth usage that can generated automatically as per company's requirement.
8. Build reports to get
enhanced view on
March Madness.

11. Get to the root cause of bandwidth issues to spot potential problems and drill down into any
element’s traffic using multiple views to get the perspective you’re looking for. You can investigate
and isolate excessive network bandwidth utilization and unexpected application traffic. Carry out
advanced forensics for troubleshooting to get to the root cause of the issue and avoid future
network slowdowns.
9. Investigate your
traffic to find out the
root cause.

12. Don't' let March Madness drive you mad! Always keep an eye on cost. Calculate the cost
of streaming bandwidth and the, cost of downtime, and measure them against the
benefits you gain before making any enterprise-level decisions.
10
10. Keep an eye on
cost.

13. THANK YOU!
piyushree.n@zohocorp.com