Marketing and Sales teams can benefit from using Web 2.0 social networks like Facebook to reach new customers and get customer feedback. It's about conversations rather broadcasting. So simply denying the use of Facebook due to security risks and time wasting applications is not a good option, much as in the 90's denying access to the Internet due to security risks was not feasible.
IT Security 2.0 requires finer grained monitoring and control of social networks like Facebook as follows:
- Restrict access to Facebook to only those people in sales and marketing who legitimately need access.
- Facebook is not a single monolithic application. It's actually a platform or an environment with many functions and many applications, some of which are pure entertainment and thus might be considered business time wasters. Create policies that restrict usage of Facebook to only those functions that are relevant to business value.
- Monitor the Facebook stream to detect and block incoming malware and outgoing confidential information.
Palo Alto Networks, which provides an "Application/User/Content aware" firewall (is that a mouthful?), appears to be able to provide such capabilities. Perhaps we might call it a Web 2.0 network firewall.
Is anyone aware of another firewall that can provide similar functionality?
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