For the fourth consecutive year, FaceTime has commissioned a survey of IT managers and end users to track the use of Internet-based applications - things like IM, Skype, P2P, social networking and other Web 2.0 apps. We also surveyed employee attitudes toward use of those applications and their impact on IT and the organization in terms of security, data leakage and compliance.
As in prior years, the research was conducted among a large sample of corporate IT managers and end users across all size organizations in North America, UK and Europe. The research study includes compiled data from more than 500 IT managers and end users. The results are quite revealing.
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Use of consumer oriented Internet applications has reached 97% of organizations, up from 85% in 2007 and, on average, companies report 9.3 applications in use by its employees on the enterprise network
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73% of IT managers report at least one security incident as a result of Internet application usage; Viruses, Trojans and worms (59%) are most common, followed by spyware (57%) for a close second
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37% of companies report an instance of non-compliance; 27% report accidental data leakage
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IT managers report an average of 34 incidents per month, and the largest companies project $125K monthly to remediate Internet usage related security, compliance and data leakage issues
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51% of end users access social media sites at least once per day and 79% of employees use social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, You Tube) at work for business reasons
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Sixty-eight percent of IT managers have archiving and retrieval methods for corporate email. About half that many--31 percent--store IM communications. One in four has copies of audio conferences (25%), while slightly fewer (20%) archive corporate Web conferences
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If requested by corporate attorneys to reproduce IM communications--in the event of a lawsuit, for example--51 percent of IT managers could not do it. Thirty-eight percent because they have no such capabilities and 13 percent could do it but not in any practical time frame
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Unified Communications suites exist at about 29 percent of IT respondent organizations. Ten percent have deployed pilots to a limited number of users, while 19 percent have deployed UC for the majority of their endusers
We'll be delving into various aspects of this exhaustive survey in the coming weeks, to break down just what this data is telling us about what's happening on corporate networks and what it means to both IT managers and end users.
