Acceptable Use Policy Reminder

Network World recently published an article talking about the recent hype over "March Madness" and the concern that streaming video from the event was going to over take bandwidth on many corporate and enterprise networks. They titled the article "Streaming video - Much ado about very little?"

Network World had a quick solution to this problem and it's a good reminder to all of us that there's a simple solution to Internet Usage, and it's called the "Acceptable Use Policy" Having an acceptable use policy is a necessary first step to making sure end-users don't abuse privileges like access to the internet.

The second step is making that acceptable use policy visible to your end-users. Most proxies allow display of a "exception" page for the first time an end-user tries to access the web. This page can have the acceptable use policy along with a click through to get to the requested web page. In addition to having an exception page, it's probably also a good idea to send out a reminder to your end-users just before events like March Madness. A simple way to keep your end-users from using up all your bandwidth. Alternatively, of course, you can either just block access to streaming video, or use a more sophisticated proxy which has the capability of caching streaming video for you, also known as a CDN (content delivery network). Proxies like, Blue Coat's ProxySG support this feature.

No matter which way you go, it's always nice to have a reminder, that there's always a simple option to solve a problem.