5 Best Practices for Network Bandwidth Management

Preparation is key to keeping networks running smoothly despite March Madness live streaming
Learn more about SolarWinds

Even non-sports fans can get swept up in March Madness mania – creating brackets, participating in office pools and reigniting old college rivalries can be a fun way to get through the last dregs of winter and liven up the office environment. However, when it comes to live streaming games on company-owned devices, on the company network and/or during office hours, end users can wreak havoc on the network. Jump to Bandwidth Risk Assessment infographic below So how can IT pros prepare for March Madness (and other popular live streaming events)? We've compiled five tips to help keep networks running smoothly:

1. Educate

Sometimes it takes a gentle nudge to remind end users that live streaming non-work related content on company property during work hours isn't the best use of their time or the company's resources. We created a handy decision-making flowchart that you can share to help employees draw the ultimate conclusion: during March Madness, mind your bandwidth!

2. Monitor Your Current Traffic Profile

There are numerous hardware and software tools that allow you to monitor, profile and baseline your current network traffic to identify when and how bandwidth is being consumed, as well as by whom and by what applications. Further, many tools will give you the ability to map bandwidth usage and its impact on your applications.

3. Establish Traffic Management or Quality of Service (QoS) Policies

Various network traffic management tools allow you to establish and monitor QoS policies to ensure that business-critical traffic, such as voice over IP (VOIP) or Web access to cloud-based applications, takes priority over nonessential traffic.

4. Optimize WAN Capacity or WAN Links

Purchasing additional bandwidth is not the only way to increase your WAN capacity. WAN acceleration will effectively increase or optimize the usage of your WAN. Or if you utilize multiple WAN links, you can direct your business-critical traffic across one link while sending the less essential traffic across another.

5. Back Up Your Network Configurations

Just in case your network does go down, you need to ensure that you have backed up your device configurations so you can quickly revert back to a known good configuration. By following these five tips, you can prevent fouling out on network uptime and turn bandwidth management during March Madness into a slam dunk!

ABOUT Brad Hale

Brad Hale joined SolarWinds in 2009 and is the Product Marketing Principal for network management products, bringing over 20 years of product management, product marketing, business development and strategy experience in the software, systems, and semiconductor industries. Hale holds an MBA from Butler University and a BS in Computer Engineering from Purdue University.
 

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5 Best Practices for Network Bandwidth Management

Preparation is key to keeping networks running smoothly despite March Madness live streaming
Learn more about SolarWinds

Even non-sports fans can get swept up in March Madness mania – creating brackets, participating in office pools and reigniting old college rivalries can be a fun way to get through the last dregs of winter and liven up the office environment. However, when it comes to live streaming games on company-owned devices, on the company network and/or during office hours, end users can wreak havoc on the network. Jump to Bandwidth Risk Assessment infographic below So how can IT pros prepare for March Madness (and other popular live streaming events)? We've compiled five tips to help keep networks running smoothly:

1. Educate

Sometimes it takes a gentle nudge to remind end users that live streaming non-work related content on company property during work hours isn't the best use of their time or the company's resources. We created a handy decision-making flowchart that you can share to help employees draw the ultimate conclusion: during March Madness, mind your bandwidth!

2. Monitor Your Current Traffic Profile

There are numerous hardware and software tools that allow you to monitor, profile and baseline your current network traffic to identify when and how bandwidth is being consumed, as well as by whom and by what applications. Further, many tools will give you the ability to map bandwidth usage and its impact on your applications.

3. Establish Traffic Management or Quality of Service (QoS) Policies

Various network traffic management tools allow you to establish and monitor QoS policies to ensure that business-critical traffic, such as voice over IP (VOIP) or Web access to cloud-based applications, takes priority over nonessential traffic.

4. Optimize WAN Capacity or WAN Links

Purchasing additional bandwidth is not the only way to increase your WAN capacity. WAN acceleration will effectively increase or optimize the usage of your WAN. Or if you utilize multiple WAN links, you can direct your business-critical traffic across one link while sending the less essential traffic across another.

5. Back Up Your Network Configurations

Just in case your network does go down, you need to ensure that you have backed up your device configurations so you can quickly revert back to a known good configuration. By following these five tips, you can prevent fouling out on network uptime and turn bandwidth management during March Madness into a slam dunk!

ABOUT Brad Hale

Brad Hale joined SolarWinds in 2009 and is the Product Marketing Principal for network management products, bringing over 20 years of product management, product marketing, business development and strategy experience in the software, systems, and semiconductor industries. Hale holds an MBA from Butler University and a BS in Computer Engineering from Purdue University.
 

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...