Paul TostoThe NCAA men’s basketball tournament is “madness” and lots of fun. But with the games ready to go in rapid fire this afternoon, we can already feel the country’s productivity sinking.
Between employees eating the corporate bandwidth to watch games online at work and other employees not showing up at all, NCAA-related sloth will cost companies about $175 million in lost productivity today and Friday, the first two full days of the tournament, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Turns out, it may also be a national security issue. The Annapolis, Md., newspaper reports the tournament might conflict with slightly more important tasks — like the nation’s defense.
“March Madness. You wouldn’t think of it as a cyber threat, would you?” said Mark Orndorff, the chief information assurance executive for the Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, during a recent meeting held by the Fort Meade Alliance in Linthicum.
“But it really is, because we’re going to be conducting military operations on our network at the same time a whole bunch of DoD employees are going to want to be checking on” the games.
That’s pretty shocking. And I’d love to take some time to explore the implications in detail. But if I don’t get my bracket done in, like, 10 minutes I’m out of the office pool.
— Paul Tosto