Do you think GTA6 is not relevant to your business? Think again!

With the immense file size of GTA 6 (rumoured to be between 80GB and 200GB) and millions of simultaneous downloads ISP networks could easily become overwhelmed. There is a very real likelihood of widespread slowdowns and outages that disrupt business operations.

With more people subscribing to servicers on or across the internet, the pull on pooled resources becomes a very real challenge.

As there will be increased gaming-related traffic, people and businesses will undoubtedly receive throttled internet speeds, worryingly where you are relying upon stable connections for critical operations e.g. banking and financial transactions.

It should be noted that the vast majority of people working from home connect to their workplace on “commodity” consumer Internet connections. These connections are designed for basic home usage, if you look at the contract the SLA’s and guarantees are extremely poor. During the COVID lockdowns many struggled with the type of network capacity issues highlighted earlier. Often, we hear of people in some areas complaining of the “3:30 slowdown” as school children come on line impacting their connection experience.

Cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and AWS will not avoid these issues and may experience delays or downtime due to heightened data traffic, hindering productivity for businesses dependent on these services.

The issue here is not so much the platforms themselves but the routes needed to pass information between the users of the systems and the hosting.

With the digital meeting place now being part of the everyday lives of many, firms using tools like Zoom or Teams may face degraded performance, dropped calls, and delayed file sharing, particularly in areas with shared bandwidth.

How would your firm cope if Teams crashed completely for a week?

Many firms have moved away from onsite phone systems and fixed land lines. Now we have the digital phone system that operates via the same type of (and sometimes shared with) lines that are used for internet connectivity.  This has the potential to cause degraded quality and clarity of calls, calls not connecting or ringing and also dropping mid call losing the conversations that could be critical to cases.

We have already had internet activity affect banking, with e-commerce systems failing on the shop floor and access to online banking being unavailable or slow at times.  Obviously, this is fundamental to our ability to trade.

A critical part of any data migration or system upgrade is the ability to maintain a continual stable connection between source and destination. Any interruption could cause either the corruption of data or the corruption of upgrade installation. Planning around the release date of GTA6 (or any other predicted issue on the internet) may be crucial in the effectiveness of upcoming projects for firms along with their third party suppliers and contractors. Avoiding the release period may allow for a much more effective project to conclude without delay or disruption. Do you have any major projects planned that clash with the release date?