Question on Bandwidth for IT types

[Russ Smith]

A friend of mine works at a company that moved over the weekend. Monday morning most stuff was up and running, but Wednesday morning when she came in she couldn't login to IM(Yahoo). It was her birthday and I had emailed her a gift certificate that she had to click on the link to get(and then print out) same thing, couldn't access it. I suggested it was an internal problem something was blocking, probably some firewall problem since they'd just moved.

Long story short her IT department says they've cut off all access to IM, yahoo mail, and some external connections because it was "clogging the server."

My suspicion is they simply think their employees are doing too much non work related stuff on the web and they're cutting them off since this server clogging wasn't an issue before they moved(or at least they never asked people to curtail use because of it).

Does stuff like IM and Yahoo mail etc really create that big of a burden bandwidth wise? Last year her company created fairly draconian rules about personal email use (with the company email) and that is of course why they have people using Yahoo mail or IM now, so I suspect this is just the other shoe dropping but I'm curious if it's really that big of an issue. I know IM is a major hog of resources on your LOCAL machine but I had no idea it was on a mail server?

 

[PortlandCardFan]

Depends on how many people are using IM concurrently. I'm not exactly sure how much bandwidth an active session takes but it cannot be much. Streaming audio IIRC is around 12-16k.

Also if you use your Internet bandwidth for more than just browsing (i.e. VPN's, client access, etc.) then those IM sessions are stealing bandwidth from business activities which is bad.

 

[Ryanwb]

Whatever the reason they give, IM is very dangerous to an enviroment because they allow file transfer and communications to bypass any content management. You are basically giving an open pipe to your company to the internet.

 

[Chaz]

Like PCF said, it may not be much for each one but if everyone was on it then it could add up to quite a bit of bandwidth use.

You are most likely correct that it is more of a security/non-company use concern than a bandwidth concern however.

 

[CardFan67]

Whatever the reason they give, IM is very dangerous to an enviroment because they allow file transfer and communications to bypass any content management. You are basically giving an open pipe to your company to the internet.

I would have to agree with this comment, I am pretty sure they are not worried about IM bandwidth... More than likely it is the open ports, I don't know why they would not say that other than they may have thought it was too confusing...

 

[Russ Smith]

Whatever the reason they give, IM is very dangerous to an enviroment because they allow file transfer and communications to bypass any content management. You are basically giving an open pipe to your company to the internet.

Good point picture sharing etc is potentially dangerous. My company doesn't block IM but they've always told us to be very carefully when reading personal mail at work(for example I have Gmail) because of viruses and the like.

My initial thought was they had just blocked her but she's since confirmed it's the whole company so I'm betting it's as you say a security thing.

Now I wish I could get Yahoo messenger to run the music and shut off the IM portion since I'm not using it and it hogs resources but I don't think I can just run the music part.

 

[SweetD]

You might want to sign up for this AMD Live is offering a free online storage service, calles AMD Live! Media Vault. You get up to 25GB of free storage, limited to 1GB of downloads per month. Uploads are limited only to the amount of space you have available, and are not otherwise metered. I signed up but have not uploaded anything yet.

http://amd.streamload.com/

 

[Brian in Mesa]

Now I wish I could get Yahoo messenger to run the music and shut off the IM portion since I'm not using it and it hogs resources but I don't think I can just run the music part.

Free music to listen to at work?

http://www.pandora.com

Create and modify your own music stations.

 

[Ryanwb]

You might want to sign up for this AMD Live is offering a free online storage service, calles AMD Live! Media Vault. You get up to 25GB of free storage, limited to 1GB of downloads per month. Uploads are limited only to the amount of space you have available, and are not otherwise metered. I signed up but have not uploaded anything yet.

http://amd.streamload.com/

I thought I read that uploads are limited to 25mb