Survey: IT Managers Embracing Social Networking

Social networking has carved itself a niche among consumers and business users who have embraced the benefits that the Web 2.0-based technology’s online environment can provide. To gauge how accepted it is in the workplace, FaceTime Communications surveyed the landscape and found widespread acceptance.

The company, a provider of solutions designed to enable the safe use of Web 2.0 and unified communications in the enterprise, found that social networking is widely accepted among IT respondents. In fact, as many as 51 percent plan to beef up security within the next 12 months to ensure their networks can handle the activity.

One related survey conducted in the fall of 2008 found that more IT professionals were reporting that social media was being used at their companies. This finding represented an increase to 85 percent over findings a mere six months earlier, at 60 percent.

Even with this increase in the use of social networking among companies, those at the top are still not embracing this innovative opportunity to connect with clients, partners and even employees. CEOs of large enterprises have not yet jumped on the social networking bandwagon and many could be missing opportunities within this space.

“The widespread acceptance of social networking as a reality for the corporate network is a relatively new phenomenon,” said Nishant Jadhav, director of Product Management for FaceTime (News - Alert) Communications, in a statement.

“However, managers are already recognizing the business value of social networking with 31 percent of respondents seeing significant business value and only 21 percent seeing no business value.”

Of those who participated in the survey, more than half would like to see specific support for Web 2.0 integrated into their Web security platform. Another 20 percent would deploy dedicated solutions to control Web 2.0.

“The reality that real-time communications and Web 2.0 applications are highly evasive is sinking in,” continued Nishant Jadhav. “These applications are designed to get around Web filtering, firewalls and other traditional security measures through port crawling, tunneling and onion routing.”

Another very real concern for IT managers could be the applications that users launch that go beyond mere social networking. Many of these sites allow for gaming and other distractive activities. In fact, gaming in a social networking context is a rapidly growing industry and will likely become an issue within the enterprise if it has not already.

The FaceTime survey of IT professionals found that 30 percent would not consider a security platform lacking in the proper tools to secure and manage social networking and Web 2.0 applications. Another 80 percent reported that information leakage was a primary concern with the use of social networking.

As social networks are used personally by 87 percent of IT professionals and 51 percent estimate that employees use social networks at work more than an hour per day, focused attention is needed in this area. Aside from the potential threats, social networking has also become an important collaboration tool and developing those capabilities could be very beneficial for the business.

At the end of the day, the company is much better served by embracing the benefits that social networking can provide, cultivating its use in a way that promotes the company and its relationships with clients. To fight against it could be futile and it would deny the company the very obvious advantages that its promotion can provide.