Prepare for Christmas network overload, IT managers warned

The warning comes from security management firm Tufin Technologies chief technology officer Rueven Harrison. "Even at the best of times, the Internet is well loaded with web surfing and email exchanges, but the cold snap, combined with impending holidays – and the fact that many people are taking their annual leave allocation before the year's end – means that workers are turning to the Internet to ratchet up their efficiency," he suggests. "Videoconferencing is definitely in vogue among many of the companies we encounter, but the real potential Internet killer is the number of web site visitors – and the consequential IP traffic that these sessions generate," he adds. According to Harrison, the potential overload will crank up a few more stops this coming weekend as Thanksgiving starts in the US, and Black Friday-driven online shopping starts in earnest. He makes the point that, while Amazon, for example, is using all manner of Internet load balancing techniques to ensure that users of its site only have to wait a short while for pages to load, the mere fact that the shopping giant's site is exhibiting delays indicates the potential scale of the problem. The solution, says Harrison, lies in careful planning. IT managers need to monitor systems, starting with the firewall, to check connection rates. "If there are rules that you need to report on, make sure that audit logs are being generated. If you are not recording firewall performance stats, turn them on now – before you need them," he urges. "Secondly, start looking for anything that can cause an interruption of service, due to resource exhaustion. What is your firewall connection table limit? If it was 25,000 last year, it probably should be higher this year," he continues. Harrison believes that exposed organisations need to plan for between a 200% greater peak IP traffic this year, compared to last, depending on business model. "Most security experts advise setting this number low enough to stop a denial-of-service, but at this time of year we are expecting sudden bursts of connections, so flexibility is the name of the game," he adds. "Also take a look at all of your disk drives. Logically, do you have plenty of space? Don't forget to physically walk to your firewalls and make sure there are no failed drives. With firewalls tucked away in data centres, and drives in RAID, we all sometimes forget to look for faults on devices, like a failed drive in a RAID mirror set," comments Harrison. "And don't forget the cloud. If, like many organisations, you are running a hybrid data centre configuration, ensure that your cloud service provider has sufficient spare and on-demand capacity to support a surge in peak time demand."