File-Sharing And Online Streaming On the Rise Again, Report Shows

July 2, 2012 by
Filed under: Announcements & Events, File-Sharing Programs, Networks & Services, Tops 

A research released by Palo Alto Networks – a network security firm – confirms that both peer-to-peer file-sharing and online streaming is rapidly growing compared to data from previous years.

The semi-annual report from Palo Alto Networks offers a thorough view on global data usage. The report is based on evaluating traffic from 2.036 organizations from across the world, and covers a period of more than half a year – from November 2011 to May 2012.

“As the lines between professional and private life continue to blur, our data shows that employees are increasingly using personal technologies like Netflix and Tumblr in the workplace,” Rene Bonvanie – Chief Marketing Officer at Palo Alto Network – said.

“The key to this ‘new reality’ is not to ignore or even vilify the existence of these applications, but to manage their usage with policies that give today’s modern workforce the flexibility they desire without impeding on the business.

Companies are finding that they can successfully implement network security controls that enable web application usage for employees while still ensuring that quality-of-service standards for business-critical applications are met and security threats are managed.”

The report highlights three important findings:

The first is that streaming video bandwidth consumption is increasing by more than 300%. Compared with the last report, the total bandwidth consumed by streaming video has tripled to 13%.

In addition, roughly 34 different streaming applications were established on 97% of the participating organizations’ networks. The increase was due to services such as YouTube and Netflix (North America) and PPStream in the Asia-Pacific region.

The second finding shows that peer-to-peer file-sharing is rapidly growing in popularity as the consumption spiked with 700%. An average of seven different peer-to-peer applications and 13 browser-based file-sharing clients were found on 89% of networks across the world.

The third discovery highlighted that social networking is still a strong player which gathers numerous file-sharing enthusiasts. For example, Tumblr and Pinterest made quite an impression in the past six months. At least one social networking application was found on 97% of the scrutinized organizations, with an average of 29 different social networking apps found on each organization.

“With over 2,000 organizations worldwide, this is the largest sample size of actual application traffic that we have analyzed since we began our research over four years ago,” said Matt Keil – Senior Research Analyst at PAN and the report’s author.

“Several trends have been consistent over time, while other findings continue to surprise us. For instance, nearly one-third of every dollar spent on bandwidth is supporting either streaming media or filesharing when viewed in terms of budget dollars. These two categories encompass nearly 250 applications, the bulk of which are dedicated to personal use.”

For more info you can visit PaloAlto Networks

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