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Handling March Madness: 8 Things IT Teams Need to Do

Sai Sundhar

Are you sponsoring the NCAA basketball tournament in March? Well, maybe not directly. But you might be doing just that if your employees stream it on the company's network through their desktops and, lately, their mobile devices as well. The result? Traffic spikes and strangled bandwidth.

Traffic spikes in IT networks are a common sight during March Madness. Users have hundreds of live streaming options and apps dedicated to the tournament. The added network traffic, of course, can lead to insufficient bandwidth and network delays for your business-critical applications and create an IT nightmare.

Here are eight things that IT teams can do to ensure that the network is well guarded and productivity remains untouched during March Madness:

1. Monitor bandwidth usage continuously

Real-time views of bandwidth usage can pinpoint the instant at which a spike occurs. This information can help identify the bandwidth spent in streaming games and verify the impact on applications.

2. Set alarms based on thresholds

Configuring a usage threshold on certain ports can help control bandwidth usage on those ports. When bandwidth usage on a specific port exceeds the configured threshold, setting up an alert can help in controlling usage at that port. This will ensure that applications on that port will remain unaffected and bandwidth is available for business-critical applications.

3. Monitor device-wise traffic

Viewing network devices at one glance based on device traffic can help identify traffic-guzzling devices. This will help the IT team troubleshoot and ensure continuous network uptime.

4. Segment the network into departments and monitor traffic

Viewing department-wise bandwidth usage across the organization helps identify departments that stream NCAA-based sites and contribute to bandwidth strangling. You can then limit bandwidth usage depending on the amount of resources needed to run productive applications and control bandwidth wastage.

5. Set the right QoS policies

Implementing the right QoS policies can help in prioritizing business-centric applications, such as CRM and corporate email, over bandwidth-consuming yet unproductive applications, such as Skype, YouTube, etc. This will ensure enough bandwidth for business-critical applications.

6. Monitor dropped traffic

Depending on the QoS policy of your organization, some traffic might get dropped. It's important to monitor this traffic because it could be business-critical traffic. Therefore, IT teams must have some visibility into traffic based on QoS drops.

7. Monitor top applications

Viewing the applications running on your network is important to ensure that your network is being productively used. Real-time visibility into these applications at a given point in time and traffic statistics based on application-wise usage improve control.

8. Measure SLA levels

The impact of insufficient bandwidth means various things: VoIP calls get jittery or video calls have a low quality score. Therefore, measuring service levels for voice, data and video is important in verifying whether business-critical tools remain unaffected.

These are some preemptive measures that IT teams can adopt to minimize the impact of March Madness on networks and organizational productivity.

Sai Sundhar is marketing analyst on the NetFlow Analyzer team at ManageEngine.

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Handling March Madness: 8 Things IT Teams Need to Do

Sai Sundhar

Are you sponsoring the NCAA basketball tournament in March? Well, maybe not directly. But you might be doing just that if your employees stream it on the company's network through their desktops and, lately, their mobile devices as well. The result? Traffic spikes and strangled bandwidth.

Traffic spikes in IT networks are a common sight during March Madness. Users have hundreds of live streaming options and apps dedicated to the tournament. The added network traffic, of course, can lead to insufficient bandwidth and network delays for your business-critical applications and create an IT nightmare.

Here are eight things that IT teams can do to ensure that the network is well guarded and productivity remains untouched during March Madness:

1. Monitor bandwidth usage continuously

Real-time views of bandwidth usage can pinpoint the instant at which a spike occurs. This information can help identify the bandwidth spent in streaming games and verify the impact on applications.

2. Set alarms based on thresholds

Configuring a usage threshold on certain ports can help control bandwidth usage on those ports. When bandwidth usage on a specific port exceeds the configured threshold, setting up an alert can help in controlling usage at that port. This will ensure that applications on that port will remain unaffected and bandwidth is available for business-critical applications.

3. Monitor device-wise traffic

Viewing network devices at one glance based on device traffic can help identify traffic-guzzling devices. This will help the IT team troubleshoot and ensure continuous network uptime.

4. Segment the network into departments and monitor traffic

Viewing department-wise bandwidth usage across the organization helps identify departments that stream NCAA-based sites and contribute to bandwidth strangling. You can then limit bandwidth usage depending on the amount of resources needed to run productive applications and control bandwidth wastage.

5. Set the right QoS policies

Implementing the right QoS policies can help in prioritizing business-centric applications, such as CRM and corporate email, over bandwidth-consuming yet unproductive applications, such as Skype, YouTube, etc. This will ensure enough bandwidth for business-critical applications.

6. Monitor dropped traffic

Depending on the QoS policy of your organization, some traffic might get dropped. It's important to monitor this traffic because it could be business-critical traffic. Therefore, IT teams must have some visibility into traffic based on QoS drops.

7. Monitor top applications

Viewing the applications running on your network is important to ensure that your network is being productively used. Real-time visibility into these applications at a given point in time and traffic statistics based on application-wise usage improve control.

8. Measure SLA levels

The impact of insufficient bandwidth means various things: VoIP calls get jittery or video calls have a low quality score. Therefore, measuring service levels for voice, data and video is important in verifying whether business-critical tools remain unaffected.

These are some preemptive measures that IT teams can adopt to minimize the impact of March Madness on networks and organizational productivity.

Sai Sundhar is marketing analyst on the NetFlow Analyzer team at ManageEngine.

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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