THE IT PRO SURVIVAL GUIDE. Managing Student Media Consumption on Campus

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1 THE IT PRO SURVIVAL GUIDE Managing Student Media Consumption on Campus

2 As an IT professional at a college or university, you ve undoubtedly noticed how connected the students on your campus have become.

3 They re more dependent on devices, more addicted to applications and consume content more rapidly now than even just a few years ago thanks to the on-demand revolution. Instant gratification is in and the more content students can binge on, the better For today s college students, screen time is literally all the time and 24/7 Internet access is no longer a nice to have it s a must have. Many of your students are not only learning on campus, they re living on campus and their expectations are even higher for excellent application quality of experience at all times. But what often stands in the way of delivering great user experiences on campus is trying to strike the right balance with your available network resources. Students enjoy streaming and they re paying to be at your institution and use the network, so blocking problem applications just won t fly. On the other hand, the all-you-canstream, no network control approach will jeopardize the performance of your missioncritical applications which won t cut it either. To complicate things further, there are still students out there that have not yet subscribed to streaming services and are still downloading content illegally, which can put your school s Federal Aid eligibility at risk. If your IT department is struggling to manage student media consumption on campus, you re not alone. Part one of this guide will outline how to allow your students to stream that sweet, sweet content without compromising the performance of your critical applications. Part two will cover how to put an end to piracy on campus so you can stay compliant and stop receiving those pesky Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices.

4 PART 1 Controlling the Netflix Binge Students Just Wanna Consume Content How many millennials do you know that aren t perpetually engaged with some type of media? Probably very few. And there s a good reason for that: when it comes to TV, we re in the midst of a new Golden Age. In the past few years there has been a massive boom in the amount of highquality, scripted shows being created and they re all available online. And in this new on-demand economy, immediate access to services and instant gratification rules everything around us. When you combine these two factors, it s an incredibly exciting time to be a student consuming content, but a more challenging time than ever to be a college IT Manager. Netflix is leading the Internet television pack with over 83 million members worldwide and due to their consumption model watch as much as you want, when you want students are taking advantage of this to binge-watch their way through today s trending shows. According to findings from Netflix s recent Binge Scale which analyzes membership behavior, Netflix members will watch their way through an entire series in one week. This means on average, subscribers are viewing over two hours of content a day to complete a series, which is a staggering amount of streaming. 1 When you consider that students have even more free time on their hands than the average Netflix subscriber, coupled with the impact that mass streaming can have on mission-critical applications, your students are bound to run into performance issues when trying to access their courserelated content. 1 The Netflix Binge Scale (Netflix, 2016)

5 An Average Day in the Dorm Sending Files 1 MB of 42 MB - about 3 hours Meet Jack. Jack s a freshman at your college and he lives in one of your residence halls. Jack has an important midterm assignment due that he needs to submit via Blackboard before the end of the day. While Jack is trying to upload his assignment, his floormates have just arrived back from class and are ready to kick back and relax. Jack s neighbors are Max, a poli-sci major who s only just discovered House of Cards and is desperately binging his way through all four seasons and Sabrina, a history major who re-watches Mad Men every time she feels homesick. With both of these students streaming shows on Netflix, Jack doesn t have the available resources he needs to reliably access Blackboard and submit his assignment. Frantic, he calls your campus help desk to submit a support ticket and complain about poor performance. You and your team are now under pressure to find out what s causing this performance disruption and fix it as fast as possible so Jack can submit his assignment on time and so the issue doesn t get worse. But the thing is you, you don t actually know for sure what s causing the problem and you re not sure exactly where to start troubleshooting.

6 How to Control Netflix Streaming There s a good chance that up to 35% of the total traffic on your network is coming from Netflix alone. 2 To regain control over rampant streaming on your network, try the following tactics: Get Granular with Network and Application Visibility With your network monitoring tools, you need to be able to get granular enough that you can detect all the different types of traffic on your network at the application level, in order to differentiate between Netflix usage and YouTube usage, for example. For complete campus-wide application visibility, you should also be able to isolate where traffic is coming from right down to the location, subnet and user level. Get Control with Multi-dimensional Quality of Service Policies Once you ve identified Netflix at the application level, you should implement traffic shaping policies that allocate the right amount of resources to streaming services for your institution. A good rule of thumb is to limit the amount of resources that Netflix can consume during your peak hours. Let s say that this is a window from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM. During these hours, Netflix can still be watched but it won t take priority from your mission-critical applications like Blackboard or Office 365. Create a second time of day policy that allocates more resources to Netflix outside of peak hours so students can enjoy their shows during their leisure time. For the students in your on campus-housing, another helpful tip is to create a Resident Fair Share policy that ensures all students are given the same, fixed amount of bandwidth so no one can consume more than their fair share. Get Proactive with Automated Alerts Now that you can see where Netflix streaming is happening and you have a policy in place to keep it from overloading your network, think about what you can do to stay one step ahead of your students and prevent similar issues from happening again in the future. If Netflix is continuously buffering, students will try Hulu, YouTube or any number of other popular streaming services to get their TV fix. Consider adding a notification engine to your network management toolkit that can auto-detect and alert you of traffic changes, so you can proactively adjust your policy set with little effort required on your part. 2 Global Internet Phenomena Report (Sandvine, 2016)

7 PART 2 % X % X Preventing Piracy and Ensuring Compliance Due to the mass adoption of Netflix and other on-demand streaming services, we ve seen a decrease in the amount of piracy happening through P2P file-sharing applications But don t let out that sigh of relief just yet When it comes to ensuring copyright compliance, it doesn t really matter if illegal downloading and sharing has decreased. If it s still happening, it s still a problem. All it takes is one student to pirate the latest episode of Game of Thrones for your school to get a DMCA takedown notice. And that one takedown notice could end up costing you your eligibility to get Federal Aid. As a college IT professional, you should be familiar with the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA). As part of the HEOA regulation, it s your institution s responsibility to have at least one hardware or software solution in place that limits access to the downloading of illegal content. If you don t adhere to these stipulations and your students are found downloading content that infringes copyright law, you re at risk of losing funding and this directly effects your school s ability to attract and retain students.

8 Here s what you can do to control illegal downloading and prove your college s compliance: Group all Programs and Protocols that Can Be Used for Piracy Ares Galaxy Vuze Soulseek edonkey

9 Students are endlessly creative and if you block access to one P2P file-sharing app, they ll simply find another one to use. To effectively put an end to piracy, the best thing you can do is categorize all programs using the broad P2P protocol by group in your network management tool. Creating this P2P application group now will save you loads of time later when you re setting up the policies to restrict access. Discard or Throttle that P2P Traffic In some cases P2P usage on your campus may be legitimate, but in most cases it s being used for illegal downloading. To double down on security, the best thing to do is simply create a rule to discard all the traffic that falls into the P2P group you just created. With one overarching policy you can swiftly control all clients that are using those underlying P2P protocols you ve already pre-grouped. IT Pro Tip: for limiting access to port-hopping applications like BitTorrent, it s better to actually throttle, not discard. BitTorrent is smart enough to know when its traffic is being discarded, so it will hop to another port to slip past your classification engine. The best thing to do to restrict BitTorrent access is limit the amount of traffic it can use to 1 kbps. This will create an unusable connection, without discarding the traffic. Students will eventually give up on the application when they realize their Walking Dead downloads won t complete ever. Next Steps In this on-demand era, students depend on video content not only for recreational enjoyment but for learning purposes as well. The secret to managing media consumption on campus is all about striking the right balance and understanding when usage turns from educational to recreational to ensure that student streaming doesn t impact mission-critical application performance. TO LEARN HOW TO GET A HANDLE ON VIDEO STREAMING ON YOUR CAMPUS AND PUT AN END TO COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT OFFICES Contact an Exinda Solution Expert For a quick demo to see how we can help.