A fine line exists between being an internet tyrant in the office and keeping your employees from hampering productivity by wasting their time on the internet. From chatting to online shopping, social media networks and video-sharing sites, there are plenty great ways to waste time on the web and managing internet use and setting different levels of control is important if you want to make sure that your precious bandwidth isn’t wasted on cat videos and pointless chats, especially when you depend on the web for critical aspects of your operations. Here are some things you can consider to ensure proper management of network bandwidth in your business network:
- Employ network access control tools and programs. There are many open source tools as well as paid services that you can install in order to manage the authority and amount of accessibility of users at particular times of day. These kinds of tools also enable administrators to keep unwanted devices and users from accessing the network.
- There are also other network access control tools that can help you filter content as well as the types of websites that people can have access to. Not only does this result in good bandwidth allocation, it also helps prevent other security risks like phishing and malware infection. Most network access control programs also allow you to monitor network usage and keep tabs on exactly the type of content users are accessing online, so you can act accordingly.
- Finally, you can prevent bottle necks from surges of data due to accessing video streaming sites by controlling streaming video traffic. There are many ways to do this, among which are banning video sites outright and controlling bandwidth allocations so employees can still access these websites, but at a reduced connection speeds, so these kinds of activities won’t interfere with business priorities.
