On Wed, 29 Apr 2009, 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. if you clamp down too much (or even to a reasonable level with too abrasive an approach) you need to factor in the damage to morale in taking away a perq that the users expect to have personally I would start with the 'post the top sites visited' approach. you may also want to do a 'top sites per IP' list and forward info on the biggest offenders to those offenders managers. a particular manager may not care (or may decide that the person is productive enough that this isn't interfering with their work), or they may take it up with the employee. I've also seen the executives as major offenders here as well. nothing you do is free (including leaving things as-is and buying more bandwidth) even the 'free' approaches with the logs take time and political capital. your management needs to decide what they want to spend your time and attention on. almost everyone else who has posted in this thread is making the assumption that this level of use is bad and needs to be stopped, but is the money you will save from this really enough to be worth the labor and ill will that taking action will generate? it very well may be, but you should think about it rather than just looking at the dollars spent on the bandwidth. David Lang _______________________________________________ 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/
