FaceTime Communications (www.facetime.com) announced today that it has added social network compliance and feature controls for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Designed to help organisations meet regulatory compliance, such as FINRA's Regulatory Notice 10-06 and to aid in the prevention of accidental data leakage, the controls allow posts to be pre-approved, logged and archived or blocked if they do not meet company policy.
Social media within the workplace now accounts for a significant portion of new business opportunities for many organisations; however, its rapid uptake, often against written policies, has also left many enterprises inadequately prepared from both a data leakage and a compliance perspective. These latest features, available in FaceTime's Unified Security Gateway (USG) build upon the content filtering controls that FaceTime introduced six months ago.
"Most companies have more to fear from accidental data leakage on social media sites than malicious theft," says Sean Glansbeek, Director of Seven Days Technologies. "Individuals and teams within all sizes of organisations are turning to social media to collaborate, often without considering the consequences of collaborating in what is in effect a public place. Even the most diligent of employees can make the occasional error in judgment, which can have serious consequences if not prevented."
FaceTime's USG enables organizations to monitor and control how employees use specific features within social media sites; for example, allowing users to only view Twitter messages but not post, update a Facebook status but not play Farmville or post to LinkedIn but not be able to recommend.
"Moderator" controls allow organisations to hold status updates and comments for review prior to posting, thus complying with rules from regulatory bodies such as FINRA, OTS and the FSA, all of which have made clear that social media constitutes electronic messaging and that applicable rules and guidelines must be adhered.
As a moderated user posts a message to Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, USG intercepts the message and notifies the user that their content will be posted only upon approval by the moderator. Moderators then approve, comment upon or reject and block posts from the USG Review Console. Approved posts are immediately visible on the social media site.
"Social networking tools are extraordinarily useful and can generate new marketing, revenue and other opportunities", said Michael Osterman, principal of Osterman Research. "However, social networking is a two-edged sword - as useful as these tools are, they can create enormous risks for any organisation. The ability to monitor and manage social networking communications allows organisations to realise the benefits of these tools while at the same time minimising the risk from their inappropriate use."
All traffic, both inbound and outbound, can be scanned for confidential or restricted content ensuring that the use of social media in the workplace is not creating a backdoor for confidential and business critical data to leak out.
All the enterprise grade capabilities of USG are inherited by the new social network compliance controls. These capabilities include: Integration with corporate directory services for authentication; Identity management for mapping social network user names to corporate identities; and export of logged content to WORM storage or e-mail archiving systems for compliance retention and e-discovery.
USG is the first Secure Web Gateway to provide social networking feature controls, and the recording and moderation of content. In addition, USG provides security, management and compliance for more than 4 000 Web 2.0 applications, such as instant messaging and Unified Communications, and protects the enterprise at the gateway with URL filtering, anti-malware and Web anti-virus protection.
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