Is Social Media Use Putting Your Business at Risk?

By Maria Valdez Haubrich

Whether your business is embracing social media to grow your customer base, or whether your employees are Facebooking on their work computers, social media is becoming an integral part of more and more small business workplaces. But few companies are taking the crucial steps to keep their networks safe from the increased risks social media use brings, according to a new report from the Ponemon Institute and WebSense.com.

Global Survey on Social Media Risks polled more than 4,500 IT and IT security practitioners worldwide and found major gaps between what needs to happen to protect companies and what’s actually happening. Although 65 percent of those surveyed said their companies do have social media policies in place, just 29 percent feel those policies are sufficient to ensure social media security.

IT professionals surveyed were realistic about the fact that social media is here to stay. Some 85 percent said workers should be able to use social media to communicate with co-workers, and 55 percent agreed that workers should be able to communicate with people outside the company. But 63 percent said employee use of social media in the workplace presents a serious security risk to their companies.

What were the biggest concerns? First, social media has led to an increase in malware attacks. Fifty-two percent of companies surveyed said they had experienced an increase in malware attacks as a result of employees’ use of social media, with the United States reporting the highest increase. Another prominent security concern was employees sharing sensitive company information through social media.

Aside from security, IT professionals had other issues with social media use. The biggest concern was that it decreases productivity (89 percent); the second biggest was that it cuts into available IT bandwidth (77 percent) and increases costs.

What can you do to keep your company safe when using social media? WebSense recommends that you set an acceptable use policy, make sure everyone is aware of it, monitor employee use of social media. On the IT side, plan for resource needs so that bandwidth is available and use real-time threat detection to monitor security risks.

Social media isn’t going away, so your company needs to deal with it realistically. That includes having a plan in place that protects your networks and your customers’ data.

Image by Flickr user asthma helper (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Business Law, Compliance, Marketing, Small Business, small business, Social Media, social media, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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