Do you know how many your employees watch? You should. The soaring popularity of Web video can expose your company to bandwidth problems and other trouble if you don’t manage it wisely.

More video—both recreational and business-related—now eats up your network’s bandwidth than ever before thanks to several converging trends. In addition to YouTube, a growing pool of video on news and sports sites like CNN and ESPN tempts employees to dive in at work. Advertising companies push clever viral video clips to promote products from sports drinks to movies. Low-cost video cameras and editing software encourage people to produce family vacation blockbusters and share them online with friends and colleagues. On a different (and more legitimate) note, companies increasingly use video for employee training. (Video training costs less than in-person training, especially for companies with multiple, far-flung offices, and can help verticals such as the food services industry satisfy regulatory training requirements.) And as companies offer more and more video on customer-oriented websites, their own employees must review that video over the WAN.

The problem is this: Your enterprise network is a pipe that has just so much bandwidth, and if streamed video consumes too much of that pipe at once, applications run slowly and documents take a long time to open. These situations, of course, can prevent critical business from getting done expeditiously and prompt the dreaded question: What’s going on with the network? IT needs to get a handle on video before it degrades the enterprise’s ability to conduct its business. Yet industry research shows many CIOs have not done the baseline analysis to understand how much of the overall pipe is being taken up by video, business apps, regular Web browsing and other sneaky bandwidth-eaters like Skype.

Flatly ordering employees not to watch streamed sports coverage while at work may or may not be part of your bandwidth management plan; that depends on lots of factors including your corporate culture. But now’s the time to explore strategies and tools to better manage video.

Nobody Wants a Video Clog

As a CIO, maybe you’re tempted to say, “There’s an easy answer to video pollution. From now on, there won’t be any streaming video on my network. End of problem.” But at a growing number of enterprises, it’s impossible to deny employees access to video. They need it to do their jobs. And once your company starts working with video, you may be surprised how quickly the amount of it grows, CIOs say.