Last time, we discussed a report entitled “The Application Usage and Risk Report” published by Palo Alto Networks which found that the majority of traffic today is based on HTTP. We also talked about why HTTP traffic presents some challenges to the traditional WAN firewall. One of the classes of applications discussed by Palo Alto Networks is what the report refers to as productivity applications delivered as a Web service. The common  use of the phrase 'Web service' is for an application or service that is delivered over the Web, but it's also frequently used to refer to a building block of a software-oriented architecture application. This is where the confusion lays.

As we all know, Google is trying to gain control of the desktop and the report indicates that it is experiencing a lot of success. In particular, 95% of the companies analyzed in the report are running Google calendar over their WAN and 88% are running Google Docs.

We were not surprised to see that instant messaging applications were being run in virtually all of the WANs that were analyzed in the report. It was a bit surprising, however, to see that there were 30 different IM programs in use. Unfortunately, IM applications typically use HTTP and as mentioned in the last newsletter, this means that IM traffic bypasses most WAN firewalls, leaving organizations vulnerable to security hacks.

According to the report, streaming media (video/audio) applications, social networking and online gaming applications were found running on every one of the 60 WANs that were analyzed. The report also identified the fact that these applications consumed 10% of the overall WAN bandwidth. As previously noted, there were 30 different IM applications running on the 60 WANs. There were also 31 different video applications running on those WAN with YouTube being the most popular.

The last two newsletters have served to identify the fact that HTTP has become a dominant WAN protocol. We've also stated our position that IT organizations need to enhance their ability to mitigate the security risks that are associated with running HTTP over the WAN.

The last two newsletters have also served to identify the fact that there is a wide range of applications such as YouTube running over the typical enterprise WAN and that these applications consume considerable WAN bandwidth. Is YouTube an acceptable application? The answer is obvious – it depends. It mainly depends on what the organization's policy is for acceptable use of IT resources. If such a policy does not exist in your organization, you need to work with the appropriate stakeholders to create one. If one does exist, you need to ensure that you can enforce it.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.