Capitalizing on Network Bandwidth Opportunities

So, today’s thoughts are all about opportunities and capitalizing on them. I am focusing on network bandwidth management here. Specifically, most Enterprises have all sorts of safeguards, filters, and sensors to prevent certain activities from saturating the network. I am curious if anyone has anything in place to actually take advantage of unexpectedly low bandwidth usage?

We have all experienced network crashes as a result of bandwidth requirements exceeding availability. Saturation, is a system hang on a good day, and server crashes on bad. Entire industries have sprung up to prevent this occurrence. We have software throttling, service degradation, and processes, such as anti-virus tools, that simply don’t start in unfavorable bandwidth conditions. On the desktop, most online back-up tools, for instance, can be set to only use a fraction of available bandwidth, of only run when the network is not overly busy.

We all know that there are times, days, and periods when bandwidth is available. Some are predictable such as evenings, holidays, and weekends, but others are just usual circumstances that drive usage down. Maybe it is a company picnic, or an especially good (or bad) news report. I wonder if anyone has a sensor set up to detect these "opportunities" and use them for the good of the system? Instead of running these tasks as scheduled "cron" jobs based on anticipated network conditions, can you take automated actions based on actual network situations?

I could imagine the following as targets of opportunities:

Downloading or pushing patches Downloading or pushing updates Disk Scanning Network Attached Storage Devices Virus Scanning Network Attached Storage Devices Virus Scanning workstations Updating intrusion detection signature files Proactively running maintenance scripts

If you are doing something like I describe, please share your experiences, techniques, and tools with us. I would be very interested in hearing more about your lessons learned, case studies, return on investment calculations, and experiences. I believe that there may be an unexploited opportunity here for network health that does not seem overly challenging to implement with current hardware, software, operating systems, and personnel. Something to think about.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for November 13, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin

Image Credit: at: 4000ft.com

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