More bosses to snoop on employee social media
Gartner, the information technology research and advisory company believes that monitoring employee behaviour in digital environments is on the rise and it says that 60% of bosses will implement formal programmes for monitoring external social media for security breaches by 2015.
Gartner says that many companies already engage in social media monitoring as part of brand management and marketing, but less than 10% of firms currently use these same techniques as part of their security monitoring programme.
“The growth in monitoring employee behaviour in digital environments is increasingly enabled by new technology and services,” said Andrew Walls, research vice president of Gartner. “Surveillance of individuals, however, can both mitigate and create risk, which must be managed carefully to comply with ethical and legal standards.”
To prevent, detect and remediate security incidents, IT security organisations have traditionally focused attention on the monitoring of internal infrastructure, the research group says. The impact of IT consumerisation, cloud services and social media renders this traditional approach inadequate for guiding decisions regarding the security of enterprise information and work processes.
“Security monitoring and surveillance must follow enterprise information assets and work processes into whichever technical environments are used by employees to execute work,” said Walls. “Given that employees with legitimate access to enterprise information assets are involved in most security violations, security monitoring must focus on employee actions and behaviour wherever the employees pursue business-related interactions on digital systems. In other words, the development of effective security intelligence and control depends on the ability to capture and analyse user actions that take place inside and outside of the enterprise IT environment.”
The popularity of consumer cloud services, such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, provides new targets for security monitoring, but surveillance of user activity in these services generates additional ethical and legal risks, Gartner notes.
There are times when the information available can assist in risk mitigation for an organisation, according to Gartner, such as employees posting videos of inappropriate activities within corporate facilities. However, there are other times when accessing the information can generate serious liabilities, such as a manager reviewing an employee’s Facebook profile to determine the employee’s religion or sexual orientation in violation of equal employment opportunity and privacy regulations, the group says.
“The conflicts involved were highlighted through recent examples of a small number of organisations requesting Facebook login information from job candidates,” said Walls. “Although that particular practice will gradually fade, employers will continue to pursue greater visibility of social media conversations held by employees, customers and the general public when the topics are of interest to the corporation.”
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