November 9, 2009 By Hilton Collins
If you use one of those ever-popular social networking applications for work purposes, or just for personal business while on the job, then you aren't alone, according to a recent industry report, but such usage can harm your network security as well.
Palo Alto Networks, a provider of application firewall monitoring and security tools, released results from the fall edition of its Application Usage and Risk Report on Monday, Nov. 9, to identify what governments and private companies were using on their internal networks between March and September 2009. It's the second report of its type to come out in 2009, following a spring edition that came out in April. Fall data reveals that social networking and collaborative applications on-the-job have increased dramatically in the past six months.
According to some Palo Alto representatives, instant messaging, blogs, wikis and contact via social networking sites are becoming ways business gets done.
"The surprising thing was the fact that the resource consumption, the session usage and the bandwidth consumption specifically, were increasing dramatically for quite a few of these applications," said Matt Keil, product marketing manager for Palo Alto Networks. "More often than not, social networking is used by employees for personal use, but it's also being used for marketing purposes and company uses."
The company assessed application usage across a sample of more than 200 organizations across different sectors in multiple countries, spanning government, health care, education and the private sector. Government samples comprised 33 percent of them.
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