March Madness: Final 4 Tips to Ensure Network and Application Availability

The NCAA March Madness tournament is officially underway, and players and coaches aren’t the only ones who need to be ready.  With a majority of the initial games taking place during business hours, IT departments across every industry know that this means increased stress on the network and decreased employee productivity. Last year, March Madness Live delivered an unprecedented 64 million live video streams, which netted out to about 13.5 million hours of live video consumption.

In order to ensure network performance and availability meets daily standards, it’s crucial that IT teams have a solid game plan in place. A well-prepared IT team should be able to take on any issue that could possibly arise and prevail. It doesn’t need to be an either/or situation. IT teams can be creative in finding solutions that work for everyone.

IT teams sometimes get a bad rap, but in situations like these, the simplest of solutions can often make a difference and leave all parties feeling satisfied.

Final 4 March Madness IT Tips to Ensure Network Availability

1. Scout your opponent: Be prepared to monitor the availability of your networks and servers to ensure victory. You will need to quickly identify problems on those systems; discover and map dependencies; and manage infrastructure health and capacity management to ensure victory during the tournament.
2. Set a screen: How about going old school for this year’s tournament? No, I don’t mean wearing Chuck Taylor’s, I’m talking about rolling out flat screens into central viewing areas and encouraging employees to stop by (for a reasonable amount of time). This saves network bandwidth and creates a fun and collegial atmosphere along the way.
3. Have a game plan: In advance of the big games during the workday be prepared to monitor wired and wireless bandwidth consumption and network traffic to track and resolve bottlenecks and identify traffic flow patterns in real-time and pinpoint which users are consuming critical bandwidth.
4. Train hard: Add some muscle to your IT team to increase performance on the court before the tournament begins by discovering what is connected and configured on your systems including device type, and configuration information of anything with an IP address.

March Madness is as much about the office bracket and the friendly competition as it is about the basketball. By being prepared and having the right game plan in place, IT can ensure a successful experience for everyone while reinforcing the idea that they can be flexible and helpful without always deferring to no.

Without a complete view of your network, trying to solve a single problem can feel like working in the dark. Our eGuide entitled “Escape the Dark Ages of Poor Network Performance and Low Availability” shares methods to map your networks and applications and develop a comprehensive network performance dashboard. Then learn how device and dependency awareness in your monitoring system can greatly improve visibility.