Blocking Online File-Sharing Services At Work Is Not Bearing Fruit

[Guest Ethan]

Blocking Online File-Sharing Services At Work Is Not Bearing Fruit

Services

A survey by Enterprise Strategy Groups (ESG) shows that although 75% of today’s corporations use policies that forbid their employees to use online sharing tools, they still find a way to bypass these filters.

The survey, which was completed near the end of 2012, covered statements from 499 IT employees (most of which being obliged to comply with one form of blocking online file-sharing or another) from all over the United States.

“The thing is, IT had control of the data in the past. Now, it has only been three years since this (OFS) market has taken off and now data is everywhere,” Terri McClure, Senior Analyst at ESG, said on Tuesday.

ESG’s study showed that 77% out of those asked had to comply with a “formal” policy or have been “strongly discouraged” or even “prohibited” to use online file-sharing tools. Just 22% of them claimed to be free of such terms and conditions.

Furthermore, when asked whether end users at the workplace use non-IT approved OFS services or not, 36% answered positive, 28% said no, 34% claimed that they suspect end users are using these services, and 1% said that they have no idea.

McClure added that circumventing the blockades is not really out of the ordinary. Most employees use Wi-Fi hotspots or even a conference room network to get access to their favorite websites.

“I’m not going to say everyone has violators … but boy, this rogue use is pretty rampant,” McClure said.

“IT is really going to have to address this challenge,” McClure continued. “If one of your employees leaves the company and they have a personal OFS account, the data leaves with them. It’s the default solution. They don’t even think about it.”

She went on by saying that just a small percent of these end-users think of cleaning off corporate data from their mobile devices, online backup services or file-sharing websites.

Online file-sharing tools have gained quite the success in the past years, and Dropbox is amongst users’ favorites, McClure acknowledged.

ESG’s survey on the companies showed that a third of them had deployed a corporate file-sharing service, 22% said they’ve examined the possibility of deploying one within a year, 11% said they consider doing the same in the next two years, and 17% claimed to have no interest in it.

In 2012, ESG started testing 13 corporate file-sharing apps; a common ground was found, with seven end users and three admins saying that “this wasn’t as easy as Dropbox.”

The effectiveness and advanced features, however, proved to be of great value once the evaluators got used to the applications.

“They said, ‘I realize how much more productive I can be because it does so much more than Dropbox does,’ ” McClure said.

“So training is really important … because there’s so much more that can be done when it comes to workflow and security.”

Digging even deeper into the subject, companies that are using business-class OFS services were asked to pin-point which enterprise services are becoming obsolete because of the former. The preferred answer was enterprise file-sharing/general-purpose file servers, NAS servers, and VPNs.

“One of the biggest cost-savings opportunities you’re looking at when deploying a private or public file sharing service is the ability to get rid of your VPN,” ESG’s senior analyst said.

“This stuff will have a material impact on business. If you can remove friction on file sharing, you can speed collaboration.”