Are There Regional Differences In Enterprise Application Usage and Threats?

One frequently asked question regarding our annual Application Usage and Threat Report (AUTR) is whether the findings are different depending on region.

The short answer is that the regional traffic and threat patterns we examined mimic the overall global threat patterns described in the report – not a surprise, considering that our data set comes from enterprise networks all over the world, and those enterprises use similar applications from leading vendors worldwide, and those applications rely on network services that are commonly targeted by cyber criminals.

That said, the 2014 AUTR does highlight some subtle regional differences, including:

• Bandwidth consumption by file sharing applications is the lowest of all regions in the Americas and Canada, while Asia Pacific- and Europe-based enterprises represent the highest volume.
• Video application usage within the Americas and Canada is the highest of all regions.
• Social media in the U.S. and Canada is five times greater than in other regions
• In Japan, e-mail traffic consumes more than twice as much bandwidth as it does in other regions
• The number of threats delivered across common sharing applications in the Americas and Canada is lower than other regions
• Code execution exploits delivered across common sharing applications in Europe were higher than in other regions
• Japan has the lowest overall volume of threats within these applications and the lowest percentage of code execution exploits
• Malware activity across UDP in Japan is nearly non-existent; nearly all malware activity in Japan we observed in web browsing
• The Americas displays the highest volume of DNS threat activity and the lowest volume of SMB-related threat activity
• Threat activity observed in SIP traffic is lowest in Europe and highest in Japan, while SMB exhibited a higher volume in Europe than in other regions

You can download the full 2014 AUTR here and also compare differences in the data by region, threat and other parameters using our visualization tool here.