* Survey shows which applications get blessing of decision-makers
In a security study we’re going to publish this week, we discuss organizational perceptions about the legitimacy of various messaging and related applications. This is important, since applications that are considered “non-legitimate” by organizational decision-makers often are used by many people in the workplace, many times for real business applications.
In one of the surveys we conducted for this report, we found that the application considered to be least legitimate is Skype, a free IP telephony application used by millions of users. We found that only one in six messaging decision-makers considers Skype to be a legitimate application in a business setting.
Among other applications that are considered by the majority of decision-makers not to be legitimate are peer-to-peer file-sharing systems (viewed as non-legitimate by 73% of messaging decision-makers), chat tools (58%) and consumer-grade instant messaging (IM) clients (54%). The most legitimate application, other than business e-mail itself, is considered to be Web conferencing applications, viewed by 95% of decision-makers as a legitimate application.
These are important findings, since they indicate there is a significant disconnect between the perceptions of many IT decision-makers and users. While some applications are rarely legitimate in a business context, such as Skype, the validity of other applications is less clear. For example in our most recent IM tracking survey, we found that 83% of organizations have some consumer-grade IM used in their networks, yet only 46% of messaging decision-makers believe consumer IM is a legitimate application.
The result can be a decision to block consumer IM traffic as a protective measure, a valid move given the potential for rogue protocols and other threats to enter a network through consumer IM. However, because many people use consumer IM for real work, taking away this capability can cause these users’ productivity to suffer.
The bottom line is that it is critical for IT and end users to get on the same page about what constitutes legitimate applications and which clearly are not. That’s easier said than done – but necessary nonetheless.
