As social-distancing mandates forced employees to work from home, bandwidth consumption and potential security weaknesses have risen, according to data from network providers and network-intelligence firms.
Traffic on the public Internet jumped by half since the beginning of the year, as employees moved to remote work, with videoconferencing seeing the greatest increase — 500% — according to Kentik, a provider of machine-learning-based network operations. Overall, the week-to-week growth in bandwidth consumption matched the month-to-month growth seen last year, says Avi Freedman, co-founder and CEO of Kentik.
Total Destination Traffic for US Index (click to enlarge)
(Image: Kentik)
Total Destination Traffic for US Videoconferencing Index (click to enlarge)
(Image: Kentic)
Network providers, in general, have handled the spikes in bandwidth consumption well, he says.
"Across broadband and transit networks, the first surges in growth this year were generally handled by existing overprovisioned capacity," Freedman says. "It has put a lot of networks into accelerated growth mode, which has also meant the usual kind of 'micro outages' but accelerated into a compressed time frame. However, it hasn't caused [many] large-scale or sustained outages."
Yet there are signs that the move to remote work caught many companies by sur ..
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