What Web Apps Are Employees Using at Work?.
Here is a summary of Next Generation Firewall vendor, Palo Alto Networks‘ semi-annual Application Usage and Risk Report‘s findings:
Web Mail and Instant Messaging are the most popular applications. Gmail, which is SSL encrypted is the most popular by traffic rate. Hotmail and Yahoo claim more users but are behind Gmail in usage. They are also moving to SSL encryption. If your network security solutions cannot decrypt SSL, you are blind to this traffic and potential data leak vector.
Facebook dominates social networking. No surprise here, but it does highlight the need for being able to monitor and control social networking using a more fine-grained approach than URL blocking, since there are business benefits to allowing some people, particularly sales and marketing, access to certain functions.
File sharing shifting to the browser. The implication is that blocking peer-to-peer file sharing is not sufficient to control file sharing any more.
10% of the applications found can be considered “Enterprise Cloud.” This covers applications like WebEx, GoToMeeting, Salesforce.com, Microsoft Office Live, and Google Docs.
