posted by: Matt on July 18, 2011 4:50 PM
filed in: Uncategorized
tagged: application control, application usage & risk report, Firewall
Streaming Audio: An Enabling Tool or Productivity Drain?
There is a view in some IT circles that any non-work related application should be banned. Social networking is their poster child and the rationale is that these apps are time wasting, bandwidth hogging, threat inducing etc.. The common reaction is to ban them all! The contrarian view is that social networking is used, as a means of getting your job done, as well as socializing. We believe that more and more IT organizations are aligning themselves with the latter of these two viewpoints. …Continue reading
posted by: Matt on June 3, 2011 1:38 PM
filed in: Uncategorized
tagged: application control, application usage & risk report, Firewall
European Workers: More Social, But Not (Necessarily) Less Productive
We recently published data that analyzed application activity in more than 1,250 organizations worldwide and confirmed what most assumed to be the case: that Facebook is indeed the dominant player in social networking, consuming 87% of all social networking bandwidth observed. However, what was somewhat surprising is that social networking has not slowed the usage of webmail (personal use email) or IM. Quite the contrary, in fact, compared with 12 months ago these application categories are very healthy with IM traffic, as a percentage of overall traffic more than doubling; while webmail increased nearly 5 fold.
posted by: Matt on May 12, 2011 2:55 PM
filed in: Uncategorized
tagged: application control, application usage & risk report, Firewall
Hiding in Plain Sight: 41% of the Applications; 36% of the Bandwidth
The 7th Edition of the Palo Alto Networks Application Usage and Risk Report provides insight into application activity that is based on 1,253 application assessments that show what is really happening on the network.
Each of the previous six reports have uncovered interesting data points and this version is no different. The most interesting data point we came upon was the [high] number of applications that can use SSL and port hopping as a means of hiding in plain sight. An early mention by Andy Greenberg in Forbes indicates he too found this data point interesting.
