Is ignorance bliss when it comes to Web 2.0 collaboration and social networking applications? Pretending the issue doesn't exist will certainly make your life easier--until an employee does something stupid or malicious with sensitive corporate information, or lawyers start delivering discovery requests. That's when this tactic begins to look really dumb.
You'll need policy and technology to ban Web 2.0 sites and tools from the enterprise. Be explicit about what kinds of sites and activities are forbidden, then be ready to back up your policy with technology. You probably already have Web filters in place, and Web proxies also provide fine-grained control over what gets in and out of the enterprise network. The downside is that new Web 2.0 sites sprout quickly, so you'll always be behind the curve. Hey, we never said it would be easy.
Cooperation is more productive than competition. If business realities allow, providing sanctioned alternatives that combine some IT oversight with the ease and mobility of Web 2.0 tools should make everyone happy--or at least able to live together.
Vendors such as PBwiki, Google, and Central Desktop also allow company accounts, which provide more IT control over collaboration. With a company account, IT can provision and deprovision users, set access rights, and prevent users from sharing information with outsiders. A company account also will prevent a user from signing up to a personal account using his or her corporate e-mail identity. For instance, a company setting up a corporate account for Google Apps would create its own domain, and then have full administrative rights over users. The account can also be linked into the enterprise authentication system, which may be stronger than the typical user name/password system used by collaboration providers.
"We have companies doing two-factor authentication on top of Google Apps," says Rajen Sheth, senior product manager for Google Apps. "Users get redirected and have to enter a SecurID code on top of a user name and password."
Central Desktop's corporate accounts let administrators set access rights to workspaces, which are the collaboration areas created inside Central Desktop. Companies with multiple workspaces can control user access to spaces, and manage rights within those workspaces, such as the ability to read, edit, and download information.
Central Desktop recently announced a security pack that customers can add to its service-based collaboration tools. Features include the ability to set minimum password length and complexity, mandating the use of letters, numbers, and special characters. The security pack also lets admins set up e-mail domains, so that information may be sent only from Central Desktop to domains on the list. E-mail also can be encrypted in transit using TLS, as long as the recipient's mail server supports the Transport Layer Security protocol.
Another feature is trusted IP addresses, in which admins can force users to log in from a defined set of IPs. "The most common scenario for restricting IP addresses is when they only want users to access the site through a VPN," says Central Desktop CEO Isaac Garcia.
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