What is real cost of social networking?

 FEB 18. 2011

Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn are rapidly becoming an everyday part of the business environment. These platforms are even viewed as essential business tools in many organizations. With the increased use of various social networking platforms, it is vital to control risk and quantify the real cost. Uncontrolled use across the company will lead to costs spiraling out of control and can open one up to unnecessary information security risk.

Information is a key driver and has become the lifeblood of every modern organization. With the ever-changing environment in which business is conducted, it is more important than ever to ensure that information is protected and risk is minimized. Preventing staff from accessing social networks is no longer an option, company executives merely have to apply sound security measures to ensure their information is protected and costs are controlled. It is critical for all companies to create the correct environment where all staff is empowered to be the guardians of information.

The entire continent has seen an explosion of bandwidth; this has brought about masses of new, naïve and uneducated Internet users. These 'new' users are more susceptible to the ever-changing risks and strategies being employed to get users to part with sensitive information, and it is essential that these risks be mitigated in a systematic manner. The objective must be to identify the challenges that organizations face and implement all possible solutions to mitigate the risk that the human factor poses in an organization’s information security strategy.

“We have been told by several clients that they had previously decided to block social networking sites, especially after noticing the extensive use of these sites. They soon discovered that since blocking these sites, users were finding ingenious but dangerous and risky ways of accessing these sites. This opened them up to very nasty network vulnerabilities and threats. In addition, at one of our clients quickly discovered that there was an average of well over 10 hours per week per employee spent on these sites. This amounted to just over 20% of their total work time being wasted. This essentially meant that a full time employee was working less than 80% of the time; owing to a single Web site. I am sure the staff would not be happy if they were only paid 80% of their salary.”

What do you think is the answer to the social network concerns that business face?