TMCnet News
ME firms alerted on staff Internet usage [TradeArabia](TradeArabia Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Enterprises in the Middle East must focus on gaining visibility into their employees' online activities as increasing use of non-business related applications accounts for significant percentage of bandwidth utilization, said an expert. Nicolai Solling, director of Technology Services at help AG, a strategic information security consulting company, was referencing a recent Internet usage behaviour report from Palo Alto, a leader in next-generation security and vendor partner of help AG. Nearly one-third of every dollar spent on bandwidth is supporting either streaming media or filesharing when viewed in terms of budget dollars, Solling said. "Because organisations do not have the right infrastructure and policies in place to control how their employees use the corporate internet, they have exposed themselves not only to the loss of productivity but also to a myriad of online threats. "At a time when we do in fact have the technologies available to grant a very high level of visibility and control over the usage behaviour, organisations cannot choose to simply turn a blind eye. The business impact of such unregulated usage is far too severe to be left unaddressed," he added. Palo Alto Networks' bi-annual Application Usage and Risk Report assessed the raw application traffic from 2,036 organisations worldwide between November 2011 and May 2012 and focused on three primary findings: 1. Streaming video bandwidth consumption increases by more than 300 per cent. Since the last version of the report (covering the April to November 2011 time period), total bandwidth consumed by streaming video tripled to 13 per cent and now represents a more significant infrastructure challenge to organizations. Furthermore, an average of 34 different streaming media applications were found on 97 per cent of participating organizations' networks. This included an increase in the use of streaming video services such as YouTube and Netflix in North America, as well as an increase in the use of P2P video streaming network PPStream in the Asia-Pacific region. 2. P2P filesharing bandwidth consumption skyrockets. P2P filesharing bandwidth consumption jumped 700 per cent to represent 14 per cent of overall bandwidth observed, growing more than any other application category. Overall, an average of seven different P2P filesharing applications were found on 89 per cent of networks worldwide. While not as bandwidth-intensive as P2P, browser-based filesharing applications were more common. An average of 13 browser-based filesharing variants were detected on 89 per cent of the participating organizations' networks. Despite the takedown of popular filesharing site MegaUpload in January 2012, browser-based filesharing held steady at roughly one per cent of overall bandwidth at organizations worldwide. 3. Social networking continues to define itself and newer players see growth. Tumblr and Pinterest both were notable over the last six-month period for gaining traction in terms of frequency and volume of use, despite the continued dominance that both Facebook and Twitter exhibit. At least one social networking application was detected on 97 per cent of the participating organizations, with an average of 29 different social networking applications found in each participating organization. Solling said that enterprises need to address the true cause of their network problems. "Organizations in the region tend to address the problem of poor network performance through the purchase of additional bandwidth. However as the report clearly highlights, it is not the network capacity but the manner in which it is being utilized that the real problem which needs to be addressed," he added. "The sooner IT departments define policies around acceptable internet usage the sooner they will be able to regain control of their network infrastructure," he concluded. – TradeArabia News Service (c) 2012 Al Hilal Publishing & Marketing Group Provided by Syndigate.info an Albawaba.com company |