Social Media in the Workplace is Not Going Away.

Some businesses may wish it would or may choose to just ignore it, but participation by your employees, customers, partners, and competition is ongoing and ever-increasing.

So, what do you do as a company to make sure your information is secure and allows participation to continue? Well, blanket blocking access to sites isn’t going to work, nor is total and unfettered access. You need a better plan in place.

The concerns about malware, information leakage, and potential business risk exposure are real and should be taken into account. So is the assessment of what capabilities promote business productivity and which ones can become time drains.

This white paper from Cisco, “Securing Web 2.0 and Social Networking for Enterprise IT,” covers all of the above and discusses why traditional methods such as URL filtering or category-based filtering simply won’t cut it. As it is noted in this paper, “By 2015, approximately 95 percent of websites will be uncategorized by URL filtering lists.” That statistic alone should make everyone think about their next steps and putting a solid social media plan in place today!

The paper further discusses proactive steps to take and solutions for secure participation within your company, such as:

• Usage controls like real-time scanning
• Identifying micro-applications used within larger applications, ex. Farmville inside Facebook
• SSL decryption
• User-based and time of day usage controls
• Dynamic malware protection

Do you have a plan in place? What is your company doing to keep your employees happy and connected via social media while maintaining a secure network?

Share your best practices or tips & tricks with us.

Cheers!
Kate