Network monitoring reveals hidden P2P traffic
Published: 28 Aug 2003 09:30 BST
These companies' initial forays into the realm of file swapping were helped along by universities, which bore the brunt of the first wave of Napster and Kazaa popularity, which began in late 1999. Many of those institutions, while loathe to block peer-to-peer traffic altogether, helped companies like Packeteer figure out how to track and manage file-swapping activity.
Now, corporations are increasingly waking up to the issue, too, following the recent wave of publicity over the recording industry's impending lawsuits against individual file swappers, a series of warning letters sent by the Recording Industry Association of America to big companies and cease-and-desist letters sent to companies where copyrighted files have been found.
"A year ago, mostly universities and service providers were worrying about their bandwidth," said P.G. Narayanan, chief executive of Allot Communications. "Now it's a different angle that we're hearing in corporate America. It's concerns about copyright law."
The problem, according to network management experts, is that corporations often don't have their PCs as tightly controlled as they would like to believe.
Many companies have strict rules about what kinds of software can be installed on company computers. Some versions of Windows operating systems have options to let only network administrators install software. Some configurations even require employees to use network-based software instead of programs located on their hard drive.
But network surprises persist. A recent study of 560 companies ranging from 10 to 45,000 employees by Canadian network-monitoring company AssetMetrix found file-swapping software installed on at least one computer in 77 percent of cases.
Craig Wysik, information technology manager at the 80-person Western Washington Oncology centre found that to be the case when he first tried Packeteer. The company wasn't having serious network-slowdown issues, but he did find some file-swapping software installed.
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