Social networking for both personal and professional reasons has exploded in the past couple of years and both individuals and companies are finding it to be an effective tool in reaching and communicating with friends and customers who were at the edge of communication circles before. But is it a threat to network security?
Fifty-one percent of IT security professionals recently polled in a survey conducted on behalf of Cisco by InsightExpress, the survey polled 500 IT, say it is. IT security professionals across Germany,the United States, India, Japan, and China claimed “social networking” to be one of the top three highest security risks to their companies. Nineteen percent chose it as the highest risk they face.
But why? The nature of the problem seems to be from employees, particularly those under 30 years of age, that
consistently work around information technology security policies so that they can use unsupported devices
and applications. But this is just one symptom of today’s increasingly mobile workforce and the expansion of borderless networks. While social networking and the use of personal mobile devices truly keep people connected to their work, and allow them to integrate personal and professional lives, new challenges in IT security are bound to arise. More than one-third of the professionals polled claim to have had to deal with security breaches created by the use of unsupported network devices.
It’s clearly a problem, but what can you do about it?
Cisco is currently working on new security features that will allow for the use of these
devices and better social networking capabilities, but still protect critical data. It’s obvious
that these devices aren’t going out of style any time soon and the future of Cisco’s security technology lies
very much in the inclusion of these new business and personal approaches to connecting with customers and employees via the internet.