This year sees the UEFA European Championship expand from a 16 team finals tournament to 24 teams, generating 51 matches over 31 days. With increasingly multi-national workforces many companies will be experiencing the footballing buzz, along with some (hopefully friendly) office rivalry.

However this can create a big problem for your network as many employees will be catching up on the football highlights, and potentially even streaming live matches. Does your network know the difference between important cloud application traffic like Office 365 and SalesForce.com, and lower-priority traffic like YouTube, BBC iPlayer or ITV Hub?

Introducing Blue Coat PacketShaper

Blue Coat PacketShaper helps you to optimise application performance and manage network efficiency, while delivering improved user experiences with its advanced WAN optimisation technologies.

PacketShaper analyses and positively identifies traffic generated by hundreds of business and recreational applications. And thanks to its integration with WebPulse – Blue Coat’s real-time web intelligence service – PacketShaper can even control application traffic by web content category. For example, you can permit low-impact web browsing like the BBC sport website, but squeeze bandwidth hungry video on the BBC iPlayer and YouTube.