Application Usage and Risk Report: Fall 2009
Social Networking & Collaborative Application Usage Explodes
The Application Usage and Risk Report (Fall Edition, 2009) from Palo Alto Networks summarizes traffic patterns on more than 200 networks worldwide to reveal that the use of social networking and collaborative applications for business purposes has skyrocketed in the last six month period. Some specific findings from the research include:
- Twitter session use grew more than 250 percent from the Application Usage and Risk Report (Spring Edition 2009).
- Facebook use increased 192 percent while Facebook Chat (released in April 2008) was the fourth most commonly detected IM application, ahead of Yahoo! IM and AIM.
- SharePoint collaboration is ubiquitous – bandwidth consumed by SharePoint, specifically the documents component, increased 17-fold from the previous report in April.
- Blogging and wiki editing increased by a factor of 39, while total bandwidth consumed increased by a factor of 48.
With increased adoption of Web-based applications come new business and security risks that go far beyond potential productivity losses. Yet most companies have outdated IT infrastructure and usage policies that may fail to protect them from these growing risks.
