The Big Web 2.0 Bang: when consumer and corporate worlds collide
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Security, Internet on
There was an interesting presentation by David Lavenda, VP of product strategy with WorkLight, at the Secure Enterprise 2.0 Forum in New York this last week. While London was getting to grips with the whole Boris and Ken thing, Lavenda had his mind firmly on Web 2.0 security matters.
In his presentation, Lavenda predicted that this year will be the one that finally sees Web 2.0 technology going mainstream. Although to be honest I think that he is a little late in making the call seeing as the likes of Facebook, according to a recent Forrester report at any rate, has more than 70 million active users and MySpace 110 million registered subscribers. However, against that backdrop of success in certain consumer facing sectors, Lavenda told his audience that up and coming services such as iGoogle has already hit the big numbers with 22 million users and growth in excess of 260 percent per annum.
So you might have expected an upbeat presentation from Lavenda, but not so when it comes to security. He cautioned listeners about need to ensure that the access given to employees when it comes to these new breed of social web services and sites is secure in order to avoid very unsocial threats such as malware and other IT security attack vectors. Lavenda went on to explain that security concerns are simply not that well understood by a swathe of folks who just do not have a handle on actually using Web 2.0 within the enterprise context. It is understanding that this is not just a set of new development tools but rather a sea change in the user experience that is key to getting on top of the situation.
“They offer a personalised user experience that allows users to easily gather and aggregate information onto their browser, whether it is iGoogle, Facebook, MySpace or Yahoo” Lavenda explained. And the problem, he went on, is that by offering totally unfettered access there lies a real risk to companies. In fact, there lies a host of real risks: data theft, information leakage and liability for information misuse to name but three. And the reason for the risks being so high and so obvious to anyone who looks is simply that the kind of Web 2.0 services we see infiltrating the workplace were never actually intended for corporate usage. They are consumer creations through and through, and we all know what happens when you mix consumer services with corporate usage: you get a highly volatile solution to a problem that never even existed.
Perhaps WorkLight founder Yuval Tarsi puts it best when he says “the consumer and enterprise worlds are colliding.” Watch out for a bang of sonic boom proportions…
Rated: 60% (2 votes)
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