Application Usage & Risk Report: Fall 2009

A recent survey suggests that more than 50% of the companies are blocking social networking. I read that and asked myself do they really believe that? I ask because our analysis of application traffic on more than 200 companies around the world proves otherwise. We found 27 different social networking applications across 95% of the participating organizations.
Like the previous three versions of the Application Usage and Risk Report,  http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/researchcenter/reports/ the findings are based on actual analysis of application traffic, not survey questions.
Social networking, messaging of all types, cloud-based productivity, collaboration, blogging and wikis, are just a few of the types of applications that fall within that nebulous group of applications defined as Enterprise 2.0. This edition of the report shows that despite many enterprises’ attempts to block applications the rate at which they are making the crossover from personal to business use is happening faster than previous crossovers, such as instant messaging (IM). Some specific findings from the research include:
Enterprise 2.0 adoption – embraced or resisted – is in full swing.

More than a third (38%) of the 651 unique applications found fall within the Enterprise 2.0 definition described above. Compared to the Application Usage and Risk Report (Spring Edition, 2009), many of the Enterprise 2.0 applications such as  SharePoint, Facebook, Twitter, and blog posting showed significant increases in usage from (continue reading...)