What most people don't know is that IM and other peer-to-peer (P2P) applications carry tremendous security risks and, by their very nature, undermine the security precautions taken by many enterprises. The saving grace, many believe, is that IM is a home-based app used by teenagers, homemakers and lonely middle-aged men.. . .
What most people don't know is that IM and other peer-to-peer (P2P) applications carry tremendous security risks and, by their very nature, undermine the security precautions taken by many enterprises. The saving grace, many believe, is that IM is a home-based app used by teenagers, homemakers and lonely middle-aged men. At least that's what Jeff Klein thought when he first set out to control IM traffic at his company, Sorrento Networks. He suspected that 10 of the company's 200 employees were using IM apps. Much to his surprise, the actual number was six times higher.

"I was shocked at the number of people using it and the amount of productivity lost to it," says Klein, the fiber-optic networking company's information security manager (see "Management, Not Banishment").

IM is everywhere--desktops, PDAs, cellphones, pagers, etc. According to a recent Jupiter Media Metrix report, more than 81 million Internet users--mostly SOHO users--use some form of IM. The Gartner Group predicts that 70 percent of enterprise employees will use some form of free IM solution--authorized or not--by 2003. IDC estimates that more than 229 million workers around the world will use IM to do their jobs by 2005.