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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

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...