FaceTime Communications (www.facetime.com) today announced the release of the Unified Security Gateway (USG) 3.0, the first secure Web gateway to combine content monitoring, management and security of Web 2.0 applications such as social networking, instant messaging, and unified communications, with URL filtering, malware and Web anti-virus protection.
USG 3.0 provides granular control of not only Web sites and applications, but also the content posted to blogs, wikis, Webmail and social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Such content can be monitored, secured and recorded - reducing outbound data leakage and enabling compliance with industry regulations, legal discovery requirements, and corporate policy standards.
Increasingly, corporations, financial institutions, government agencies, schools, and other organisations are finding that Web 2.0 platforms are an important medium for communicating with employees, partners and customers, but their traditional security solutions do not combat the risks associated with these collaborative technologies.
Additionally, Web 2.0 platforms introduce new compliance and policy challenges. For instance, financial advisors already using IM now also use Twitter and other channels to communicate with clients; yet regulatory bodies such as FINRA require that these communications be monitored and archived. Schools are required to comply with the Child Internet Protection Act (CIPA), but also need to find a way to allow access to educational sites and even YouTube videos without enabling access to harmful content. Government agencies and corporations worry about sensitive information leaking out over Twitter or Facebook.
"Users will continue to bring Web 2.0 applications into enterprise networks and IT managers can either try to lock down the network, or they can secure these applications and reap the benefits of social media collaboration while regaining control," said Kailash Ambwani, president and CEO of FaceTime Communications.
"USG 3.0 delivers unique capabilities in not just monitoring and securing inbound and outbound content over Web 2.0 and Internet applications, but also in our innovative reporting, providing a birds-eye view of user behaviour across all the modalities of Web, social networks, IM and Unified Communications platforms - providing a clear understanding of a user's complete activity."
Organisations are now faced with the challenge of managing and securing the converging worlds of enterprise communications and collaboration on the one hand, and publicly available social networks and Web 2.0 applications on the other.
FaceTime's survey of 1 100 worldwide IT managers, in June 2009, revealed that social network usage in the enterprise is widely accepted by IT professionals, however, two-thirds of respondents placed high-importance on controlling which groups or individuals can use social networking on the enterprise network and for how long. Eighty percent of the over 1 100 IT managers surveyed saw information leakage as a primary concern, with malware propagation over such networks seen as a key issue by 90% of respondents.
According to the "Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection, 2009", published by the Gartner Group: "The Web is simultaneously becoming more important and more dangerous to modern business. Web 2.0-based applications and services, such as Skype and salesforce.com, have the ability to cut costs and improve productivity. Organisations are increasingly interested in opening up Web access to Web 2.0 applications, such as social networking and IM, but are concerned about security risks. Concurrently, the Internet is also the primary source of malware infection and the primary channel for data loss due to external hacking. Yet fewer than 20% of organisations have adequate solutions to effectively protect their endpoints from Web-based attack and effectively manage Web participation."
Traditional security tools, such as firewalls and URL filters, are bypassed by the thousands of applications, such as streaming audio and video, file sharing and collaboration tools, which are capable of hopping from port to port, using encryption and non-standard protocols, and tunnelling over HTTP.
“We knew that some degree of Web 2.0 application usage was happening in our network, but our initial evaluation of USG gave us the full picture,” says Ted Hickman, Global Network and Telecommunications Manager, Cook Group Incorporated. “USG now gives us granular control over what our users can do, we've shut down a host of unauthorised P2P usage and we're now monitoring and reporting on our users' behaviour across the whole Web 2.0 spectrum.”
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