By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor
The use of Facebook (News - Alert) over corporate networks is having an impact on overall network performance and security. Ignoring this potential problem will result in severe consequences, says network security company BreakingPoint.
BreakingPoint is now offering a “Facebook emulation” feature to help organizations analyze the impact of social media like Facebook on the performance and security of their IT infrastructure.
The BreakingPoint Storm Cyber Tomography Machine (CTM (News - Alert)) has the ability to emulate tens of millions of concurrent users logging onto and using Facebook, from posting videos to playing "FarmVille," company officials said.
It then adds Facebook emulation to a library of 130-plus applications and more than 4,500 security attacks in order to accurately measure the performance, security and stability of carrier, enterprise and government networks and data centers.
“Most businesses treat Facebook as merely a Web site when it comes to measuring the impact on the network,” said Dennis Cox (News - Alert), BreakingPoint CTO and co-founder, in a statement. “In truth, it is a complex ecosystem of application protocols helping to serve up status updates, gaming, chat functionality and much more.”
With over 500 million users and surpassing Google (News 
- Alert) as the most visited Web site, Facebook is being watched as one of those Web sites that consume maximum network bandwidth.
This bandwidth consumption can have great impact on the performance of business-critical applications such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) or e-commerce transactions.
A sudden increase in traffic to Facebook could put the Quality of Service policies of organizations in jeopardy, say industry experts. Social networks are also becoming the platforms for the distribution of the latest security attacks.
According to BreakingPoint, businesses need to also validate the efficacy of content-aware Deep Packet Inspection devices including DLP solutions that must detect someone posting critical business information, say, credit card numbers, to a network such as Facebook.
A free evaluation of the BreakingPoint Storm CTM is available to qualified companies, according to company officials.
Back in Oct., BreakingPoint has been awarded a patent for the company's breakthrough in network processor technology, which unleashes the real-world, global-scale network conditions required to measure the resiliency -- performance, security and stability -- of network and data center infrastructures.
This innovation, according to company officials, drives the BreakingPoint Storm CTM.
