Bandwidth Bandits: How to be the Sheriff of your Business and Catch the Culprits

Is there anything more anger-inducing than working on a project and seeing with the spinning wheel of death? Try as you might, you simply cannot move forward because the darn computer is going so slow.

If it’s not your PC that’s causing the slowdown, there’s a good chance it’s the bandwidth.

Every computer at your business requires a minimum amount of bandwidth to perform necessary business functions. There are some bandwidth bandits out there that unnecessarily eat up a great deal of your bandwidth, which could cause network slowdowns.

A Wild West Metaphor – Bandwidth and Horses

Imagine you’re a cowboy, and you want to ride your horse into the sunset. It’s just you and your trusty steed on the open road, there’s nothing slowing you down! Now imagine the sun is setting and you’re riding off but there is a stampede of other horses! They’re all vying for space on the road and it’s forcing you to slow down.

In IT terms, we define bandwidth as the maximum rate of data transfer across a given path. In our metaphor, the horses represent data, and the road is the bandwidth. Bandwidth can come in different sizes, and like comparing ponies to Clydesdales, different applications use up different amounts of bandwidth.

Rounding Up the Bandits

The first step in identifying bandits is to separate necessary business functions from unnecessary applications (like YouTube or Pandora). The goal is to ensure that you utilize your company bandwidth as effectively as possible.

Bandwidth Bandits are applications which are not essential but take up a great deal of internet speed. Usually, these are streaming services, which may also have a negative impact on employee productivity.

Here are the Top 3 Most Wanted Bandits:

Video/Music Streaming

1. • Video is the worst offender! in 2015 Netflix was responsible for eating up 37% of America’s internet. Other culprits are YouTube, Amazon Video, and Hulu
   • Music streaming, like Pandora, Spotify, and iTunes.

File Sharing

1. • File sharing goes both ways, with people uploading and downloading
   • Beware of your employees transferring anything that might be copyrighted material, or you could face legal issues as well.  

Malware

1. • If you are aware of a sudden drop in bandwidth, it may be due to malware. Hackers can infiltrate your network via one computer, and then effectively take over any other computer in your network.

There’s a New Sheriff in Town

As a business owner, you’re the Sheriff of the internet and you have the power to lay down the laws, like “no personal Facebook use while at work.”

Every Sheriff needs a good Deputy to uphold the law, and that’s where Copeland comes in. If you suspect there are bandwidth bandits lurking around, we send a team to investigate. We help identify the culprits and form a plan on how to deal with them.

One of our services is content filtering. We install a system into your network that prevents employees from going to “bad” sites. Not only will this streamline your use of bandwidth, it also adds an extra layer of cybersecurity protection.

Contact us today to partner in your protection.