Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and a host of others. Consumer-oriented social networks are growing in popularity with enterprise users who may or may not always have a business reason for logging into these services to update their “status” or finding new “friends.”
But as CIO Update reports, these same social networks have long posed a security risk and many companies limit or restrict their use altogether. IT security firm Trend Micro says such restrictions could lead to bigger problems and offers an alternative strategy.
The popularity of consumer social-networking services like Facebook and Twitter has spilled over into the workplace, bringing potentially dire consequences, warns Trend Micro.
As part of its corporate end-user study released Monday, the IT security firm found that the use of social networking sites in the workplace grew from 19 percent in 2008 to 24 percent in 2010. Some 1,600 end users in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan were surveyed.