March Madness is getting down to business as the pretenders have been weeded out and the contenders are getting ready to faceoff for a trip to the Final Four. Our own March Madness with a network management spin is off to its Final Four as we move through the Elite 8 today and Thursday. (If you are wondering what this is about, check here for the full Ipswitch Madness.)
The Bandit Region presents us with a heavyweight bout of network problems. The Bandwidth Hoarders are the folks in the office who watch videos on YouTube or Vimeo, or stream music from Spotify or Pandora, among other streaming activities that can cause strain on wireless networks. And of course there’s this year’s NCAA March Madness tournament which is always one of the most popular events each year that lead to a lot of bandwidth hoarding. Bogging down the network is the enemy of all network administrators. In contrast, BYOD is all about productivity. Workers want all of these devices, whether company-issued or personal, to be connected to the ‘net at all times. They’re doing their jobs like everyone else, yet they never miss whatever comes through text, Skype, WhatsApp, Facebook or pretty much any program or site that makes their phone beep, ding or chime to mark the arrival of a message.
Ipswitch March Madness: Bandits and Greys Hit Final Four
This kind of multi-tasking is not a common way to work for the Baby Boomers in the workforce. But the Generation Y crowd works well with multi-tasking using all sorts of devices and programs. They grew up with the Internet and MTV and rapid, short communication is a natural way for them to process information. But it can be sometimes taxing on a network environment with the average worker being hooked into the corporate network with three to four separate devices. This extra drain needs to be accounted for. While we praise the dedicated employee and quietly curse the hoarders, due to the sheer number of those who want to bring their own [fill in the blank] to work, BYOD has punched its ticket to the Final Four.
Finishing out the left side of the bracket, the Grey Region seeks out its champion with Slow Apps against Lack of Visibility. Most IT admins will tell you that the problems they hear about from users (before they know they even exist) but are hard to identify and isolate the root cause, are some of the toughest to solve. For that reason Lack of Visibility is a strong contender for the title. Slow Apps (aka application performance problems) drives users crazy and is the number one problem faced by IT pros. It ranks first because it is the issue they hear the most from their users. When email comes to a crawl, remote access is busted, or the sales team cannot access their CRM application, you can’t help but notice.
Although Lack of Visibility makes finding the root cause of a problem to be a real pain, Slow Apps lead to a rush of help desk calls and open cases, and oftentimes less-than-pleasant demeanors from those seeking assistance. This game had two strong contenders, with Slow Apps cutting down the nets on their way to their first Final Four.
Stay tuned for the next round between winners of the Reliability Region and the Influx Region in a few days.
If you want to learn more about how March Madness applies to your daily work life, join us on April 9 for webinar entitled “Network Management’s Sweet 16 – Solve the Problems Competing for your Time“. Register here for the 8:00AM (US ET) tip off or here for the 2:00PM (US ET).