Enterprise IT Challenged by User Demands

Cisco announced the results of a survey exploring the security implications of social networking and the use of personal devices in the enterprise. Perhaps the most telling finding was that employees continue to work around restrictive corporate IT security policies.

Why do businesspeople, including senior corporate executives, continue to bypass their own IT organizations? Typically, the most common complaint is a lack of agility -- an inability to meet the business technology needs of internal stakeholders in a timely manner.

Another significant finding: 71 percent of the survey respondents said that overly strict security policies have a negative impact on hiring and retaining talented employees under age 30.

Conducted on behalf of Cisco by InsightExpress, the survey polled 500 IT security professionals across the United States, Germany, Japan, China and India. The results illustrate that the consumer influence on enterprise IT is growing and that more employees are bringing personal devices and applications into the network, presenting new business opportunities and security challenges.

Unrelenting Demand for New Business Technology
The survey explores the changing enterprise security landscape due to the evolving requirements of today's borderless networks, the benefits and drawbacks of accommodating an increasingly mobile workforce, and the challenges of protecting sensitive and proprietary data.

Highlights of the latest market study include:

• More than half of the survey respondents have determined that their employees use unsupported applications – such as Social networking (68 percent), Collaborative (47 percent), Peer to peer (47 percent), Cloud (33 percent).
• Nearly half (41 percent) of the respondents have determined that employees have been using unsupported devices, and more than one-third of that number said they have had a breach or loss of information due to unsupported network devices.
• Despite these trends, about half (53 percent) of the IT respondents said they are likely to allow personal devices on the network in the next 12 months and 7 percent already support personal devices.
• More than half (51 percent) listed "social networking" as one of the top three biggest security risks to their organization, while one in five (19 percent) considers it the highest risk.
• Social networking tools are an unprecedented and highly beneficial tool for many parts of organizations, including human resources, marketing and customer service.
• Nearly three out of four survey respondents said that overly strict security policies have a moderate or significant negative impact on hiring and retaining employees under age 30.
  

"Increasingly, unapproved and unmanaged personal devices in the corporate environment are hastening the need for more intelligent security management. These solutions must deal with difficulty of protecting individuals and corporations while providing a positive user experience and corporate data access from any device, anywhere, anytime," said Chris Christiansen, program vice president, Security Products and Services Group, at IDC.

Managed service providers and their cloud-based managed security service offerings can enable corporate IT leaders to be more responsive to the business technology needs of their internal and external customers -- by out-tasking routine networking applications and thereby freeing up staff time.

Quest for Integrated Collaboration Service

Examining the ever-changing landscape of online collaboration, and assessing the growth of social networks, Cisco announced findings from a recent market study about end-user collaboration applications and individual preferences within the workplace.

Within the group of respondents using social networking for work, fifty-nine percent say that their usage of social media applications has increased over the past year. The study also found the most frequently used application for collaborating with others is email (91 percent).

However, what people want from their email application is changing -- the findings highlight the potential for email service evolution.

The market study, conducted by Harris Research, surveyed more than 1,000 end-users from across the United States and found that email is the preferred collaboration application at work for a variety of reasons.

Navigating within the Comfort Zone
Respondents like the fact that email provides an easily-accessible record of communication and the ability to communicate with many people at once. Users also rank email prominently among various online collaboration tools because there is a high-level of comfort in using the application to easily communicate with others inside and outside their organizations.

However, the poll showed there are many problems associated with the way most email solutions function today.

Many survey respondents complained they receive too much irrelevant email (40%) and that they lack the ability to collaborate in real time (32 percent). End users also dislike the fact that they have very limited storage (25 percent) and that large volumes of email come into their inbox with no organizational structure (21 percent).

In addition to email, the Harris poll found that other applications being used by respondents to collaborate with others in the workplace include shared spaces (66 percent), voice calls and teleconferencing (66 percent), web conferencing (55 percent), video conferencing (35 percent), instant messaging (34 percent), and social networking (17 percent).

Half of those using social networking for work by-pass IT restrictions to do so. The study participants who prefer to use social networks indicated they would like to have control over who sees their content as well as be able to share with groups of users using different tools.

Designing an Intuitive Collaboration Experience
The respondents also indicated the desire to collaborate in real time without having to open up an additional application.

To address the needs of end users, Cisco is focused on providing an integrated collaboration experience between its recently announced hosted email solution and a variety of the company's other collaboration offerings including enterprise social software, unified communications, IP telephony, instant messaging, and presence.

This collaboration platform combines various data sources and allows communications to turn into shared content. This new type of collaboration -- plus the evolution of email -- helps enable better teamwork, whether ad-hoc or formal, internal or external, and will deliver improved inbox efficiency, via topic organization, to accommodate growing email volume.