The research comes out of Palo Alto Networks’ latest Application Usage and Risk Report, who conducted the survey by analysing 2,036 organisations worldwide between November 2011 and May 2012.
While not necessarily a workplace time waster in all cases, video streaming as a percentage of total enterprise network usage has tripled since December 2011 – it now makes up 13% of all bandwidth consumed on business networks, as opposed to just 4% last year.
While this could be construed to be for business applications, the fact that much of this YouTube and Flash Video streaming in the UK, alongside Netflix and Hulu in the US means that it is unlikely to be for enterprise usage.
The big shock of the survey is Peer-to-Peer file sharing, which was up 700% across the period to 16.6% of total bandwidth usage. Again, while this does have legal applications, such as using DropBox and other online storage and workplace collaboration tools, it also includes the illegal downloading of movies, music and other software through torrents and other illegitimate means.
While not illegal in itself, torrents as a method of distribution are generally associated with piracy – in this case the use of Bittorrent accounts for 12.9% of all enterprise bandwidth usage.
This means, all up, that potentially around 26% of all bandwidth being consumed in the business networks is being used for entertainment purposes only – much of it illegal behaviour. This compares to just 8% for this kind of activity in December 2011.
This creates an unacceptable infrastructure burden on the company that lowers the performance of legitimate work based applications and customer’s experiences, but also stunts worker productivity and raises overall business costs for no justifiable reason. It also poses security risks through link jacking (for streamed video) and malware introduced from less than reputable sources (such as illegally downloaded TV shows).
In addition, companies put themselves at very real risk of breaching copyright law when staff download copyrighted material. Under current regulations, the company may be liable for illegal conduct on its networks, whether it was aware of it or not – which can mean lawsuits and fines.
The aforementioned ‘legal’ file sharing, such as using browser based storage tools like Box, GDrive, Skydrive, iCloud and DropBox, also pose security threats in terms of leaked data. Staff need to be educated about the correct storage and protection of company data, as leaving important documents floating around on personal or public networks is hardly best business practise.
Social networking has long been a business manager’s productivity nightmare, but it is increasingly being seen as a business tool. It also uses far less bandwidth than many managers suspect.
As the report notes: "The view of social networking as a bandwidth hog is erroneous; the total bandwidth consumed by all social networking applications is a mere 1%. As a category, it is ranked 12th out of 25, far behind other categories such as audio streaming, email, and management."
Facebook remains dominant, boosting its percentage of total social networking bandwidth usage to 54% from 37%. Twitter, however, has lost market share – dropping from 21% to 11% – this has been picked up by Tumblr, which has boomed from 1% to 10%.
