An onslaught of content is traveling through your servers right now. Do you block it? Do you pass? Perhaps you can score. Anyway your employees play, it's the customers who'll demand that you get'cha head in the game.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the NCAA basketball tournament season wreaks havoc on IT managers. The lesson from last year was that March Madness does present a security risk to corporate networks. Two years ago, the concern was bandwidth drain -- not surprising since nearly 1.4 million users watched streaming video of the nationwide contests last year.

Ken Godskind, VP of sales at AlertSite.com, a Web site performance monitoring and management company, explains that IT departments that aren't prepared for the flood of live video streams and downloads at work are diminishing. However, IT teams should still monitor these functions to make sure the company's infrastructure doesn't foul out because of employees' basketball obsessions.

"It does make a lot of sense for corporate enterprises that they keep an eye on their networks at this time of year," Godskind said in an interview.

Businesses are expected to lose $1.7 billion in lost productivity, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas estimates.

However, this year does seem a bit different. Companies are getting their head in the game.

Vendors are stepping up to help make networks more secure. Bandwidth has been expanded thanks to an increase in video content. And some companies are even embracing the notion that their employees are bound to check out a video clip or two on CBS Sportsline, AOL, Yahoo, or ESPN. South Florida's Sun-Sentinel is even reporting companies in the area are encouraging employees to participate in office pools and other assorted activities associated with the 64 bracketed contests.

The issue seems less prominent, according to the report, because of the influx of mobile devices and increased worker productivity. Translation: Those who have their head in the company game most of the day are allowed to blow off a little bandwidth watching college kids live their dreams.

Are online advertisers prepared in terms of Web performance? With nearly $21 million in revenue expected for advertising on March Madness sites, Web performance and the user experience are essential for these advertisers to get their money's worth.

AlertSite.com is monitoring the Top 5 March Madness sites for Web performance. Initial results for the first 30 hours show that live video feeds are slowing these sites down. ESPN had the longest load time with 18.7 seconds. However, the metric was based on sitting through a commercial preload without skipping ahead.

"For what it's worth, ESPN during the 3 p.m. hour on Wednesday wasn't playing the commercial," Godskind said. "We see page performance varies widely with these sites because of the ways they are structured."

CBS Sportsline had the best load time with 4.2 seconds. Yahoo ranked second with a 5.6 load time and AOL came in third by popping up 10.4 seconds on average. Each site has made multimillion dollar investments in the last few years to handle increased Web traffic and ensure their site is working at its peak all the time.

To paraphrase a recently popular basketball song, "Watch out for the traffic spike and keep an eye on defending the network. Gotta run the 'give and go' and take the site to the hole. ...And don't be afraid to shoot the outside 'J.'"