Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0 solutions are rapidly making their way into our clients businesses – turning from a consumer application into a true enterprise opportunity.
To be fair, we expected to see this in some of our more progressive clients, but not necessarily in some of the more conservative verticals. Right now, we feel like we’re in a mad dash to determine how to use this opportunity to directly communicate on a 1-to-1 and 1-to-many basis.
Recent broad-based research has indicated that 95% of businesses in Australia allow or encourage their employees to use Web 2.0 applications.
However, while Web 2.0 brings many opportunities these applications were designed at the consumer level, raising multiple security and other issues in the enterprise 2.0 environment.
With the blurring of lines between professional life and personal life, new policies and procedures must be established:
- To prevent the massive quantum of confidential information which is “lost” via the web we need to implement real time security measures which analyse traffic bi-directionally;
- There must be real time content analysis & classification to appropriately deal with the amount of user created content, mashups and multiple frames;
- Detailed policy and scrutiny of access and use of message boards and social media;
- We must control the use and access to individual applications ie. whilst using an iPhone is acceptable do we really want to open iTunes and thousands of applications to the enterprise environment?
At the moment, we’re assisting our clients with policy framework before strategic work starts. Don’t underestimate the scale of the opportunities, threats and time involved.
The research breakdown of such issues as:
- Data protection and integrity
- Vulnerability and identity management
- Physical, personnel and application security
- Incidence response
- Compliance
- SLAs and liability’
- End of contract coverage
… are well worth reading and considering.
As always, the naysayers and vested interest groups will delay the move to the cloud for as long as possible while the acolytes continue their march toward corporate IT salvation.
