Locking Down IM

Before you embrace instant messaging, be sure to address the risks.

By David Geer

August 29, 2005 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Instant messaging has fought the battle for business turf and won. The use of IM in the corporate sector has reached mainstream status, and it's a welcome productivity boost.
"Before IM, we had too many salespeople who had to get up and go meet face to face because someone couldn't be reached. And with e-mail, you have a latency issue, so employees would get up and go talk to each other," says Josh Stallings, vice president of strategic initiatives at No Red Tape Mortgage in Sherman Oaks, Calif.
"Now our people are on the phone all day because they can [simultaneously] IM our processing team to get the information they need for our clients," he says.
IM is a real-time text communications technology with which messages can be sent, received and viewed immediately. And it's nearly everywhere, says Paul Ritter, research director for messaging and collaboration at Wainhouse Research, a communications market research firm in Duxbury, Mass. "Our research shows that more than 80% of large companies in the U.S. have some form of IM," he says.
But IM is risky and could cause as much damage as rogue e-mail, says S.V. Purushothaman, program leader of the conferencing and collaboration group at Frost & Sullivan Ltd., a high-tech consultancy in New York. "Today, 10% of global IM messages are spim," or IM spam, says Purushothaman. "It has the same potential as e-mail spam."
Moreover, hackers are finding it easier to break in through IM buddy lists than by other means, he says.


Image Credit: Isabelle Arsenault

While some companies have outlawed IM because of security concerns , many are looking for ways to mitigate risks while enjoying the business benefits. Here are steps you can take to secure IM in your organization.

Manage unauthorized IM clients. This applies to anything that's added to IT assets and infrastructure, says David MacLeod, director of information protection and assurance at The Regence Group, a health insurance carrier in Portland, Ore. "We have a very well-defined, -controlled and -monitored electronic perimeter," he says. "We know what can leave our organization and what can come in. That is clearly the first and most important step when you want to introduce anything new onto the network."

Address risks that arise from change. Simply adding IM to the network, like adding any software, introduces risk. "It's not because it happens to be IM. Anytime we add something new to our environment, there are security and privacy considerations," says MacLeod. "You need to determine whether it has altered the

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