With an explosion of online video on sites such as YouTube, company networks have felt the crunch. But deciphering legitimate use from messing around can be tough. eTelemetry, a company that handles networking monitoring, has introduced a tool analysts say can help. eTelemetry, a company whose software aims to help organizations monitor network usage, announced today a new tool that allows companies to control the amount of bandwidth being consumed by online video from sites such as YouTube. RELATED LINKS Banning Social Networks a Losing Battle Forrester: Consolidated Web 2.0 Market to Reach $4.6 Billion By 2013 Nine Consumer Technologies CIOs Fear The tool comes with the eTelemetry’s Metron appliance. Analysts say it could help many companies contend with what has become a difficult issue in the enterprise: more consumer web-technologies being utilized during the day by employees slow down the critical applications needed to run a business. While the tool offers typical web-blocking and filtering features, it also promises to control how much bandwidth an application or website can consume, without necessarily blocking the site. This is especially important, eTelemetry executives contend, when it becomes hard to decipher whether sites are being used legitimately or improperly. For instance, employers might want to allow users to use nytimes.com or cnn.com to stay up to date on the news and market conditions. But those sites can take up enterprise bandwidth, as the media industry has begun using video more heavily. Ads sometimes begin running video without asking the user visiting the page to click “play.”“The demand for bandwidth is growing rapidly,”says Ermis Sfakiyanudis, eTelemetry’s CEO. “The ability to give your mission critical apps a designated amount of bandwidth so everything runs in the background is a big deal for a lot of companies.” Sfakiyanudis says the tool will also help companies who want to manage network usage by department. People in sales and marketing, for instance, might need to make heavy use of online video, while those in operations could probably go without it. The eTelemetry software allows line of business managers to set access and to monitor which sites their employees use. That eases the burden of IT, who traditionally had to take requests from those managers to set permissions, according to Sfakiyanudis. David O’Connell, a senior analyst at Nucleus Research, says that the issue of bandwidth as a result of consumer applications on the Web has been a particular problem for small and medium businesses. They have more limited resources than large enterprises, he says. Plus, freeing up IT to worry about other things could make such a tool compelling. “Everybody knows there is inappropriate use [of consumer video and websites] going on,”O’Connell says. “But there usually isn’t anywhere to put this data in an accessible way [for managers]. It’s really labor intensive for them. This saves the IT folks from that distraction.” Related content feature 10 most popular IT certifications for 2023 Certifications are a great way to show employers you have the right IT skills and specializations for the job. These 10 certs are the ones IT pros are most likely to pursue, according to data from Dice. By Sarah K. White May 26, 2023 8 mins Certifications Careers interview Stepping up to the challenge of a global conglomerate CIO role Dr. Amrut Urkude became CIO of Reliance Polyester after his company was acquired by Reliance Industries. He discusses challenges IT leaders face while transitioning from a small company to a large multinational enterprise, and how to overcome them. By Yashvendra Singh May 26, 2023 7 mins Digital Transformation Careers brandpost With the new financial year looming, now is a good time to review your Microsoft 365 licenses By Veronica Lew May 25, 2023 5 mins Lenovo news Alteryx works in generative AI for speedy analytics results OpenAI integration and AI wizardry for report generation are aimed at making Alteryx’s analytics products more accessible. By Jon Gold May 25, 2023 3 mins Analytics Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe