Businesses must face Web 2.0 risks

Internet applications used by employees pose a serious security threat to businesses, and they are not being dealt with, a new survey says.

FaceTime Communications’ global survey of 1,600 corporate IT users found that 99% of employees use an internet application at work, which represents at 21% increase from five years ago. Those applications are not risk assessed, cleared or deployed with security measures by the IT department.

What makes matters worse is that only 62% of IT managers were aware of social networking applications being used on their systems, but social networking was in fact present in 100% of cases. This means that 38% of IT managers were completely in the dark about the risks present on their networks.

In other areas, IT managers’ estimates were shown to be optimistic. Whilst 62% of managers estimated that file sharing tools were present on their networks, the real figure was 74%. In a massive 95% of locations web-based chat was being accessed, but only 31% of IT professionals were aware of this.

The result of all this, of course, is security breach after security breach. On average, IT managers reported 57 security incidents related to internet application use every month, which is more that double the levels of 2008. Naturally, this comes with costs too; organisations spent $200,000 every month on rectifying data breaches.

Again, as said before on the Calsoft Blog, the answer is education and policy. Carter herself said "Policy and education are key to mitigating risk, with conditions of use written into employment contracts." When legislation coming into force on April 6th that could land businesses with hefty fines for security breaches, businesses will be forced to recognise these risks.