SpamTitan’s audit of 200 SMBs worldwide in Q1 of this year revealed almost all allowed Internet access and some social networking applications in the workplace. But while 76.4 percent said Web filtering was important around half (49 per cent) of all respondents admitted not using one.
The two most common reasons given were cost and absence of any legal obligation.
Of course the results also show that at least 50 per cent of SMBs are taking positive steps when it comes to securing themselves against social networking attacks and around 16 per cent of those that have not done anything yet are intending to do something about it in the next 12 months.
“This survey shows that economic pressures and the pace of change in working practices have left many SMBs struggling to balance the benefits and risks of Web 2.0,” said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO of SpamTitan Technologies. “Evidently they understand the dangers and fully intend to protect themselves over time but this still leaves a significant window of opportunity for social networking attacks to leave key loggers and other types of malware on the network with potentially costly consequences.”
Social networking and Web 2.0 applications are second nature to young people entering the workplace. They bring their Facebook, MySpace, YouTube identities to the office and at the same time use professional social networking for more work-related duties. Businesses require security tools that are flexible enough to allow policies and parameters to be adjusted easily so as to strike the right balance between control and creativity.
“Companies need to get to a point where they are not just blocking or allowing access, but are managing employee behaviour,” continued Kavanagh. “For example, our Internet filtering solution WebTitan is helping our customers constructively manage Internet usage, improve network security and reduce bandwidth demands in an innovative, flexible and affordable way.”
WebTitan allows users to create and apply different policies to a limitless number of different workgroups. It is possible to create flexible policies and permissions for different individuals, groups or departments within an organisation. WebTitan has a dynamic database that is updated daily with new blacklisted sites. The categorization database along with the anti-malware protection automatically update in the background at periodic intervals set by the administrator. Featuring extensive and customizable keyword filtering and comprehensive reporting, WebTitan has minimal impact on resources so as to help companies meet the challenge of staying secure in the fast changing world of social networking as cost effectively as possible.
