Corporations are facing a growing risk as consumer grade tools and services suchas blogs, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn enter into the IT security landscape. Webservices, Internet applications and other consumer online products are rapidly distortingthe lines between corporate and personal usage, while malware outbreaks and data losscontinue to snowball out of control.
"Firms are using more consumer-style Web applications... 84 percent of firms increasingtheir use of Web applications"- Forrester 2010 1
Preserving enterprise security while using Social Media services has become astructural requirement as IT departments must find equilibrium between use and control.
Barring the use of consumer-style tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn byemployees is no longer realistic. Additionally, filibustering and application control policiesare becoming inefficient with dynamic user generated content and cross-site, drive-byattacks on trusted websites. All of this coupled with access through multiple endpoints(mobile devices, PDAs, and tablets) has rendered traditional approaches futile.
With strong visibility of the application content and the aptitude to apply flexible policiesover users, applications and protocols based on the real-time comprehension of theintent of these applications, deep content inspection-based security solutions empowerorganizations to take advantage of the benefits of Social Media, while safeguardingorganizational policies and guaranteeing compliance mandates are met.
Losing Control? Go Past Obstruction
Classic methods that rely on "allow or block" policies are now obsolete since employeesutilize Social Media for both work and non-work related activities. Alternatively, securityplatforms that permit clean content offer greater benefits to the organization by scanningand securing everything coming in and out of the network to protect against malwaretransmissions, data loss and blended threats. Positioning remediation-based, high-performance web security products with deep content inspection in their networksenables organizations to certify real-time security enforcement when retrieving dynamicweb applications. Organizations no longer need to agonize over what is being approvedwhen they know that malicious content is blocked and clean content is accessible.
Beat Social Engineered Assaults
The popularity of Social Media has allowed psychological manipulation of end-users byhackers. Hackers are capitalizing on the downloading of malicious content or browsingmalicious sites. Recent studies by leading security vendor show that social networkingsites are 10 times more effective at delivering malware than previous methods of emaildelivery. To defend an organization against these socially engineered attacks, inlinereal-time threat protection and malware analysis of all content, including hidden injectedmalware attacks and downloads, is necessary. Deep content inspection-based solutions,with high-performance architecture and anti-malware analytical engines are capableof efficiently analyzing web traffic for malicious attacks at all endpoints. This providesorganizations with the comfort of knowing that they are still protected, even if theiremployees have been tricked.
Compliance: Don't Let Social Media Cost Your Company Money
Social media carries an array of legal risks, and necessitates the same complianceand regulations that govern e-mail and the static web. Whether a firm allows the use ofsocial media or not, employees continue to use these sites, opening up the company topotential compliance violations. By ensuring that an organization's internal policies andarchiving systems are safe, companies are able to extend their reach to Web 2.0 andSocial Media in order to maintain compliance.
Prevent Social Media Attacks From Stealing Sensitive Information
Organizations must continue to evaluate the implementation of policies that aredesigned to protect sensitive corporate information being retrieved through consumer-style applications (fileshare, Gmail documents, etc.) or other Social Media sites. Deepcontent inspection-based data filtering and content scanning capabilities can preciselymonitor and control sensitive data transmitted in web, email, and network applications,thus averting costly information leaks being transmitted through traditional or consumerfocused applications.