Granted that social media is a game changer – it now gives access to businesses to a vast consumer base, rapid word-of-mouth, and high levels of engagement. It forces businesses to adopt a value-driven marketing strategy, call for a new way to manage conversations, and develop brands.
Companies are not blind to these facts: According to a McAfee study 85% of companies with more than 1000 employees do have a social media policy in place while 80% of these companies allow access to social media sites. For instance, at least 80% of companies surveyed use LinkedIn as a way to hire new talent and to find new employees.
In a previous post titled Social Media Threats: Dawn of a New Media Along With New Business Concerns, we pointed out a few facts:
An average financial loss related to a social media security incident costs upwards of US $2 million. Large businesses have a lot more to use with financial losses amounting to US $4.5 million. At least 60% of organizations report that the worst damage inflicted on their companies relate to reputation and brand while 14% of them report litigation costs.
It’s clear that as much as there are benefits with social media, there just as many threats. How should enterprises manage these threats? Let’s take a look at some possible solutions:
Application-aware Controls
With social media, it’s not a simple task to manage security for the simple fact that it requires granular control. Take the example of Facebook: managing security with Facebook isn’t just about blocking Facebook itself for enterprise users because Facebook is now used as a login option for various other sites. There are also hundreds of applications that integrate with Facebook at various levels. That calls for application aware controls that provide granular protection for users. For instance, enterprise users will see games blocked or many other specific blocks for some broad category of applications on Facebook while leaving general access to the site intact.
Overall Data protection
Enterprise data protection is fairly standardized for usual targets for data security measures such as mobile devices, tablets, or removable media such as HDD or thumb drives. Social media suddenly opens the gates to even more security risks associated with employees posting sensitive or defamatory information across social media networks. Enterprises need to monitor and have solutions in place to trace sensitive data and block such information dissemination. Some of the features needed to protect such data is to render some websites as read-only and prevent access to post information. In some other cases, HTML rendering could be manipulated to remove features that allow employees to use specific functions of a website, etc.
Anti-Malware and Internet Security Suites
Internet security suites are available for enterprise users that regularly monitor and protect while usage. Most browsers themselves come with some in-built security features while enterprises can prime this security level up by adding firewalls and proxies. Blacklisting of certain websites, restricted access to the Internet, deploying anti-virus and anti-malware solutions are some of the ways companies can hope to fight these alarming threats.
For companies today, it’s necessary to embrace social media but with the rider that companies should also be ready to mitigate risk. Companies should also train employees to help them see the potential risk of their social media usage. Enterprises might also want to consider deployed layered control, deploy user-aware and application-aware protocols, and other available solutions to protect enterprise data from the increasing threat of social media as a new “medium” that can also prove to be a threat if not managed properly.
How do you manage social media threats?
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