Social Networking for Business Reasons…What About The Risks?
- Friday, June 26, 2009, 9:39
- Threat Research
Matt blogged earlier about Haworth adopting various and sundry social networking applications. Haworth is a perfect example of an organization that is a bit ahead of the curve – adopting these applications for business reasons, yet managing the inherent risks. More thoughts on that:
Any organizations that are not yet diving into social networks headfirst will be doing so shortly. There are lots of legitimate business reasons to embrace social networking applications – seems like lists of why you should engage are cropping up weekly – here most recently, but marketers also salivate over the sheer size of the audience – here. Mostly, organizations are interested in new, fast, cost-effective marketing channels, customer intimacy, and reaching a new generation of consumers (although social networking adoption is rapid among the over 55 set – with 19% of over 55 Internet users participating). Some organizations embrace these apps for purely employee culture reasons. It is worth noting that many organizations don’t quite know what they’re going to get out of the experience – so there is a tremendous amount of experimentation.
In most organizations, information security professionals cannot (and should not) stand in front of the social networking steamroller, but instead help their organizations manage the risks associated with social networking applications? But what are they? And how does one manage it?
Step 1: Understand the Risks. (continue reading...)
Because so many employees are using Enterprise 2.0 applications without permission IT departments are feeling the only solution is to block them all together but they are missing the fact that these applications can also deliver significant business value and by using systems like the ones designed by Palo Alto can help them maximize their employees abilities to utilize these applications without endangering their networks, their recent white paper on http://bit.ly/d2NZRp has some real solutions to the problems IT departments everywhere are facing.