Advertisment

Number of firms blocking social media slides

author-image
CIOL Bureau
New Update

MUMBAI, INDIA: Beyond a mere time-wasting activity, social media can also be the best mode for netwroking and supporting company practices. It is no wonder that the number of organizations blocking access to all social media is dropping by around 10 percent a year.

Advertisment

"Fewer than 30 percent of large organizations will block employee access to social media sites by 2014, compared with 50 percent in 2010," according to Gartner, Inc.

"Even in those organizations that block all access to social media, blocks tend not to be complete," said Andrew Walls, research vice president at Gartner. "Certain departments and processes, such as marketing, require access to external social media, and employees can circumvent blocks by using personal devices such as smartphones. Organizations need now to turn their attention to the impacts of social media on identity and access management (IAM)."

Gartner said that social media environments include mechanisms to collect, process, share and store a more complete range of identity data than do corporate IAM systems.

Advertisment

They enable a more complete view of identity, one that extends beyond the bounds of organizations. For IAM managers, this is both a threat and an opportunity. Identity data and social media platforms can expose organizations and users to a wide variety of security threats, but organizations can also use this identity data to improve support for their own IAM practices and the ambitions of business stakeholders.

Gartner identified three significant impacts of social media on IAM.

1. Personal trust misaligned with corporate trust as employees who participate in online social media continually make judgments about the degree of trust they should place in the platforms.

2. The collection of identity data by public social media on a massive scale enables improvements in the production of identity intelligence. This pushes IAM programs to discover the user profiles accessed by staff and to maintain capabilities for accessing external services in order to harvest identity data.

3. Identity data can be leveraged for IAM. Social media provide a mechanism for verifying the identity of employees, job candidates and customers, and a cloud identity platform for performing IAM for other applications. IAM programs can use social media for identity verification and to extend identity services to internal and external applications via a semi-trusted social platform.

"Organizations should not ignore social media and social identity," said  Walls.

tech-news