Hi, Jeremy: Have you considered a policy, possibly linked to performance reviews, for 'frivolous' use of bandwidth? In these days of financial pressure, laying down a reasonable-use policy may have a very good return on investment.
I'll leave the discussion of the relative merits of possible hardware solutions to others (my $WORK is big in the area of the kind of gear that might help solve this - but I'm not here to sell gear :-). - Richard Jeremy Charles wrote: > I don't want to get on yet another salesdroid's radar, so I'm asking the > community instead. :-) > > We're repeatedly faced with a situation where we purchase more Internet > capacity, our employees eventually oversubscribe it, we buy more, lather, > rinse, repeat. Currently, we're purchasing 40 Mbps of Internet from our > ISP, and the ISP's router guy tells me that his router typically sees about > 60 Mbps of traffic actually trying to come to us. (We're mostly an eyeball > network.) > > I'm tempted to look in to purchasing something like a Websense product or > other mechanism for, shall we say, reducing the appetite for non-business > Internet use during prime business hours. The big question I first want to > get a feel for is: Will the cost of the system be made up in terms of > reduced need to purchase more Internet capacity? > > Would anybody mind sharing order-of-magnitude numbers on what you had to pay > in order to get something that did a good job at this and how much reduction > in Internet usage you think it resulted in? > > > Yes, I realize that you also have to factor in things like lost productivity > due to web surfing, security risks that the device could also reduce, etc. > That's all fine and good, but it's rather impossible to put those concepts in > to hard numbers that I can put on a purchase proposal. I need something that > I can sell to Layer 8, which is currently running in "cost paranoid" mode. > > > ---- > Jeremy Charles > Epic's Computer and Technology Services Division > [email protected] > Phone: 608-271-9000 Fax: 608-410-5961 > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ > _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
