Do not miss the warning signs – be prepared

By Nick Emanuel | July 2, 2012 | Leave a Comment 

Nick Emanuel

It’s not just the Ukrainians and the Polish that are seeing a surge in demand as the Euro Championships take place. Here at Symantec, we have noticed some curious spikes in data usage, around the time of key games.

For instance, our data processing centres saw a 20% uplift in week on week user traffic in the hour prior to kick off in the game between England and France on June 11th. During the match this increased further, hitting a 75% uplift compared to the previous week. During that peak our bandwidth monitoring saw the equivalent of approximately 7,500 live media streams passing through our UK data centres per second.

I’ve no doubt that businesses of all types experience similar upturns in data demands during big sporting events such as the Euro’s, which leaves open the obvious question; how are people preparing for a whole host of sporting events that are taking place in 2012? With a summer of sport set to be watched by millions across the globe, many are sure to reference the internet consistently throughout to keep up to date with their favourite events and any key developments. The spikes we have witnessed throughout the Euro’s has provided a nice gentle stress test for our systems, which have coped with the increase comfortably. Other organisations should use this tournament just as we have, as a key indication of the likely impact that business is going to face.

Though often hard to calculate the exact amount of data expected to pass through a company’s system, recent spikes should prove very useful in informing how people should equip and prepare for the likely surge we will see over the coming two months. It would be silly to neglect this information, and be caught out when data peaks during busy periods. Being prepared to respond to these increases will ensure a seamless continuation of business, ruling out any potential losses or disruption that might occur to those that have not heeded the early warning signs.

 

Understanding security threats

By dominic_cook | September 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment 

dominic_cook

Last year we embarked on producing an occasional series of short video’s looking at common internet threats and issues. So far they have covered: Phishing, Botnets, The Underground Economy and Drive-by Downloads.

We wanted them to be educational and have some humour to better educate people using the web at home and at work about how to protect themselves from common threats and risks. So far the initial 4 video’s have gone down well, being posted on sites like YouTube and Facebook, as well as the Symantec website and even a number of online retailers.

The lastest two video’s in the series have just been finished. They are:

  1. Symantec Guide to Scary Internet Stuff – No 5 Misleading Applications
  2. Symantec Guide to Scary Internet Stuff – No 6 Denial of Service Attacks

Please have a look at them, and also the other videos in the series, and if you have any thoughts for new topics we should cover, let me know.

Dominic Cook