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Sys Admins Get Ready for Super Bowl Monday

Aaron Kelly

The Super Bowl may be the sports highlight of the year in the United States – an unofficial holiday of sorts – but it’s also big business for the advertising world. The average advertisement cost for the 2015 game is expected to be approximately $4 million per 30 second slot with more than 50 commercials set to air. While the game is the headline event, there is considerable attention paid to the advertisements that will run throughout. So what does this have to do with system administrators or your corporate network? A great deal more than you might think.

Just as Cyber Monday has become the busiest day for online shopping, the Monday after the Super Bowl has become one of the most bandwidth heavy days for corporate networks as a result of employees watching commercials on news outlets and social media platforms. All of which are made readily available through publications and video hosting sites such as YouTube.

The question of who won the game often becomes secondary to the question of who won the advertising wars because judging the advertisements has become a popular media segment for national publications. Major online media sites will post links to the advertisements and ask viewers to watch and rate what they thought were the best of the best. This is a win-win situation for everyone; the advertisements get more exposure and the media outlets keep viewers on the site for longer periods of time boosting their rankings. However, this is far from a best case scenario for the corporate network’s performance and the critical business applications that run on it.

Imagine half of the employees in your organization are watching a YouTube video at the same time. Now multiply that out across approximately 50 advertisements or 25 minutes of streaming. Sounds like a great deal of bandwidth will be absorbed and network performance will suffer. This doesn’t even take into account the lost productivity of employees watching commercials rather than performing their job functions.

So as we head into the big weekend, what can sys admins do to prevent a bandwidth slowdown come Monday morning and avoid a Super Bowl hangover of a completely different variety?

First, get it on record today that the practice of streaming video is frowned upon within the organization as it adversely affects the ability of workers to do their job effectively by slowing network and application performance.

Next, have a plan in place that permits blocking of YouTube and other video hosting sites for employees whose job does not depend on these sites.

Last, if experience tells you that your organization is one that is obsessed with the Super Monday phenomenon, make it fun. Create a viewing area in a central location where advertisements are being streamed from only one source, rather than through every individual work station.

Whether you have a rooting interest or not in the Super Bowl game, it’s always a time for fun and celebration. The advertisements that debut during the game are the most eagerly anticipated and most scrutinized of the entire year. Careers in the advertising world have been made or destroyed based on the public’s reaction to the spot. As a sys admin, your career is dependent upon making sure the network and its applications function at a high-level so that business gets done and customers are satisfied. Make sure come Monday that you are making the right call for your organization.

Aaron Kelly is Product Management Executive at Ipswitch.

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Sys Admins Get Ready for Super Bowl Monday

Aaron Kelly

The Super Bowl may be the sports highlight of the year in the United States – an unofficial holiday of sorts – but it’s also big business for the advertising world. The average advertisement cost for the 2015 game is expected to be approximately $4 million per 30 second slot with more than 50 commercials set to air. While the game is the headline event, there is considerable attention paid to the advertisements that will run throughout. So what does this have to do with system administrators or your corporate network? A great deal more than you might think.

Just as Cyber Monday has become the busiest day for online shopping, the Monday after the Super Bowl has become one of the most bandwidth heavy days for corporate networks as a result of employees watching commercials on news outlets and social media platforms. All of which are made readily available through publications and video hosting sites such as YouTube.

The question of who won the game often becomes secondary to the question of who won the advertising wars because judging the advertisements has become a popular media segment for national publications. Major online media sites will post links to the advertisements and ask viewers to watch and rate what they thought were the best of the best. This is a win-win situation for everyone; the advertisements get more exposure and the media outlets keep viewers on the site for longer periods of time boosting their rankings. However, this is far from a best case scenario for the corporate network’s performance and the critical business applications that run on it.

Imagine half of the employees in your organization are watching a YouTube video at the same time. Now multiply that out across approximately 50 advertisements or 25 minutes of streaming. Sounds like a great deal of bandwidth will be absorbed and network performance will suffer. This doesn’t even take into account the lost productivity of employees watching commercials rather than performing their job functions.

So as we head into the big weekend, what can sys admins do to prevent a bandwidth slowdown come Monday morning and avoid a Super Bowl hangover of a completely different variety?

First, get it on record today that the practice of streaming video is frowned upon within the organization as it adversely affects the ability of workers to do their job effectively by slowing network and application performance.

Next, have a plan in place that permits blocking of YouTube and other video hosting sites for employees whose job does not depend on these sites.

Last, if experience tells you that your organization is one that is obsessed with the Super Monday phenomenon, make it fun. Create a viewing area in a central location where advertisements are being streamed from only one source, rather than through every individual work station.

Whether you have a rooting interest or not in the Super Bowl game, it’s always a time for fun and celebration. The advertisements that debut during the game are the most eagerly anticipated and most scrutinized of the entire year. Careers in the advertising world have been made or destroyed based on the public’s reaction to the spot. As a sys admin, your career is dependent upon making sure the network and its applications function at a high-level so that business gets done and customers are satisfied. Make sure come Monday that you are making the right call for your organization.

Aaron Kelly is Product Management Executive at Ipswitch.

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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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

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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