By Dave Ewart, Director of Product Marketing, EMEA, Blue Coat

Nowadays, employees expect to be able to use social networking sites, but they understand that it’s reasonable for an employer to limit how much time they spend playing Cityville or Farmville and how much bandwidth they consume watching videos, especially if it threatens their business traffic as well as their career prospects.

Employees should also be made to understand the importance of protecting their employer’s network from malware and protecting their property – and how cybercrime can betray the trusted social networking environment.  Recent analysis by Blue Coat reveals that, of the top five malware vectors, social networking sites now rank almost equal with familiar “classic” malware sources, such as pornography sites and email attachments.

But while the assumption today is that it’s no longer appropriate just to block Facebook, IT departments still struggle with decisions around productivity and security versus the need to communicate and share information in social networks. Not least because traditional blocking technologies force a fairly binary decision, block it all or allow it all.

What organizations really need is to allow social networking, but control it. They need to be able to leverage the motivation, communication and business benefits of social networking without the productivity penalties and security risk. A new approach, new methods and new depths, as well as granularity in filtering and blocking technology, are needed to implement a policy that can protect your business and your employees.

Using filtering technology that is deeply aware of web categorization and application activities inside social networks, it is possible to enforce policies that allow access to social networks and their applications but limit what the users can do within those applications. For example, secondary ratings within the “social network” category that can allow for enforcement of different restrictions or allowances based on these and on specific activities and specific applications. By tying policy into the authentication methods you have on your network, these can apply differently to different individuals, functional groups or departments. And they can apply different rules depending on the day or time of day.

You should also expect rich reporting tools to help you monitor and hone your policies, and report on their success.

With the proper technology controls in place, there is no need to be afraid of social media.  Feel free to like, comment and share — just make sure that it is properly controlled for the organization’s own compliance purposes.