March Madness in the Work Place

The past two days are probably the two most exciting days for the sport of basketball, and arguably sports in general. Of course we are talking about the first round of March Madness, 32 games in 2 days. Its two days in which teams who know nothing about each other get to play each other on the biggest stage in college sports, always making for exciting and unpredictable play. However, one thing that is predictable is the amount of people streaming these games from their office computers. One industry study has estimated the value of lost employee productivity due to March Madness at $1.8 billion.

So who in specific does this March Madness craze affect? For one the IT guys at these companies. Popular college basketball websites such as NCAA.com and CBSSports.com, where any game can be streamed live, generate a 10,000% increase in traffic flow during this time. IT professionals can bet that decreased network performance will occur. So besides employee productivity decreasing it seems March Madness can also potentially severely disable network performance, inevitably interfering with business goals and daily operations of a company.

Even just a few employees watching a game simultaneously can dominate a network gateway, impairing internal business traffic, and slowing applications. The amount of corporate bandwidth used to stream these lives games is quite eye-opening. Who would have thought such an American classic like college basketball could cause so much financial and productivity loss to a company. Good thing it only happens once a year.