The impact of online shopping on corporate networks

With 88 percent of retailers offering aggressive online discounts on Cyber Monday, over 70 million Americans were expected to shop online from work.

A survey from Ipswitch shows that more than 50 percent of IT administrators expected to lose more than 20 percent of their company’s network bandwidth from employees shopping on the job during Cyber Monday.

Ipswitch recently conducted an online poll of IT administrators asking how much network bandwidth they anticipated their company losing to Cyber Monday shopping. Of those polled, one-third of respondents expected to lose more than 30 percent of network bandwidth on the 29th.

Conversely, 28.5 percent, the next largest group, expected to lose less than 10 percent of their network resources to online shopping during the work day. The smallest group of administrators, 17.6 percent, expected to lose between 10 and 20 percent of their network bandwidth.

“Cyber Monday continues to grow and is clearly the largest online shopping day of the year,” said Ennio Carboni, president of Ipswitch Inc.’s Network Management Division. “However, big savings for consumers can translate to less network bandwidth and lost productivity for employers. We expect many organizations to track and calculate the impact of Cyber Monday to make sure that their critical business operations have the bandwidth needed in the future to handle this “peak day’ of network usage.”