302 events. 46 world championships. 17 days.

How many events will your employees watch at work?  And what’s the effect on network bandwidth?

With a five-hour time difference on the east coast alone, it’s safe to assume that employees will use the corporate network to catch up on the action they missed while sleeping and stream live events (and replay them) while at work.

Events like this – and March Madness, for example – pose a major risk for companies that don’t have processes and tools in place for monitoring network bandwidth: Imagine if a group of employees stream a Michael Phelps swimming heat or the U.S. basketball game – the resulting network slowdown could cripple company-wide productivity.

Seem farfetched? The effects of overloaded networks are already being felt at the 2012 games. On Sunday, broadcasters from the BBC had trouble tracking GPS signals from cyclists due to an overloaded communication network.

Here are three steps for ensuring that your networks stay fast, healthy and secure during the London games:

• Make sure you have a monitoring tool that measures the capacity and performance of your network.

• Put protocols in place that prioritize high-importance network traffic and limit bandwidth requests for non-business reasons.

• Educate your employees on cyber security.  Events like the Olympics provide major opportunities for hackers to lure employees into traps.  A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security warned that malware and phishing scams could increase during the Olympics.