march-madness-IT

The business of ed-tech: March Madness edition


Campus IT officials may have a March nightmare of epic proportions

march-madness-businessCampus IT officials haven’t always thought of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament — March Madness — as a technological nightmare of epic proportions.

That’s what March Madness has become, however, on campuses large and small, with students streaming NCAA tournament games on their various mobile devices, laptops, and video game consoles. IT directors watch as mammoth amounts of bandwidth are devoured while the school’s basketball squad makes a push toward the Final Four.

I once had a university IT director tell me that if students hadn’t been on spring break during the school’s March Madness first round game, there could’ve — and probably would have — been major network complications that might have prompted extreme measures.

Those measures could have included blocking devices from connecting to the campus network, just as colleges blocked some students from downloading Apple’s iOS7 when it was released last fall.

Carmine Clementelli, product manager at iNetSec — maker of network security management solutions — said the massive influx of devices connected to a college or university Wi-Fi network during March Madness games accentuates the need for more robust security measures designed to monitor who (and what) is using a school’s web connection.

Traditional network firewalls, Clementelli said, only go so far in guarding against malware, botnets, and other cyber threats from breaching a school’s internet network.

(Next page: Fending off threats)

“Educational intuitions need to look towards ways to protect their network and data from internal threats,” he said.

Fending off internal threats means deploying technologies that tell IT officials exactly what kind of devices and applications are being used on the Wi-Fi network. Apps that don’t meet certain security thresholds, Clementelli said, can be blocked before causing serious problems that could, at worst, expose sensitive student and faculty personal information.

“It’s always important to block incoming threats,” he said. “But it’s also important to understand what is using your network,” especially during high-bandwidth times such as NCAA Tournament games.

Taking precautions with network security tools that go well beyond the standard firewall could prove vital for colleges and universities anticipating the annual late-March spike in the number of students using the local network to stream basketball games.

March Madness has proven such a reliably nightmarish time for college IT departments that many schools keep a close eye on bandwidth usage in the hours before, during, and after their school’s team plays in the single-elimination tournament.

The University of Detroit in 2012 saw a remarkable 30-percent jump in bandwidth usage during the second day of March Madness.

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