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The time has finally come for the football lovers out there – the World Cup has arrived!
If you’re anything like me, that means wiping the diary of anything non-football related over the 32 days of the tournament, and elevating your expectations of England’s chances to heights of pure delusion before they go crashing out in a completely justifiable manner that you disguise as an outrage to humankind.
If you’re an IT or network manager who doesn’t like football, you have a tough month ahead of you. Not only will you have to put up with the endless chat about missed penalties, disputable offsides and Brazilian beauties (you might not protest about that one), but your network is also likely to face more strain than England’s leaky defence.
In the internet world we live in today, your company’s employees will be utilising your network to ensure they don’t miss a second of the action in Brazil, whether that be through live transmissions or catch-up viewing.
The ubiquity of smartphones and tablets means that video apps are expected to see a 40% spike during the tournament, while streaming is likely to comfortably exceed the 22% jump that was witnessed during the last World Cup in 2010.
This increased strain and use of potentially malicious mobile apps is likely to make your network more vulnerable, but not to worry because you have a chief security officer (CSO) to look after that – or do you?
Actually, many UK organisations still don’t, but they may change their mind after reading our feature on their evolving role in the enterprise (p.36).
In fact, we have lots of great stories you can squeeze into gaps between football this month, including how to build the best hybrid cloud for your business (p.26) and why you still don’t need a chief data officer (p.50), as well as insights into unified communications (p.32) and social enterprise (p.22), and interviews with the CIOs of Gatwick Airport (p.19) and Cambridge University Press (p.16).
Happy World Cup month!
Click here to download the latest issue of Information Age
