What Every Business Should Know about File Sharing

Unless you work for a university, chances are you haven’t thought much about file sharing. In the business world, file sharing is often lumped together with “collaboration.� It’s a business tool. It boosts productivity. It keeps all of your employees connected.

All of this is true. What’s equally true is that file sharing also poses risks. When file sharing is unmonitored and poorly controlled, your organization’s data assets are at risk – especially during tough economic times.

At its most basic, file sharing simply poses copyright issues. Employees download illegal music or videos and store them on your servers. You may be exposed to liability if you don’t have proper security checks in place.

However, liability is a smaller risk – probability wise – than the more immediate costs of bandwidth over-provisioning and degraded application QoS.

Where Did All of Our Bandwidth Go?

In fact, a comprehensive study of Internet traffic conducted by ipoque discovered that P2P traffic represents anywhere from 43 percent to 70 percent of all Internet traffic for any given region.

The common assumption is that most of this traffic occurs outside the enterprise walls, but that is simply not true. Yes, conventional security can block things like eDonkey, but file sharing constantly evolves to embrace new protocols that sneak past firewalls. Furthermore, websites like RapidShare don’t even require client-side software and are incredibly difficult to block.

If you’ve seen a spike in your Internet traffic and a degradation of QoS-sensitive applications, it’s time to start investigating the bits and bytes traveling through your network.

What Exactly Is on Your Network?

Do you know what files are on your network? Can you be confident that they are all business related and that they don’t put your organization at risk? Without traffic inspection being part of your security arsenal, you can’t.

For now, the enterprise is relatively safe from the kind of lawsuits that plague universities. Students download more copyrighted material than the average employee, and thus they’re a much better target for the RIAA and MPAA (which enforce copyrights for the music and motion picture industries, respectively).

However, enterprise IT administrators need to worry about more than just copyright violations. If pornography, for instance, shows up on your network, the company could be liable for sexual harassment and guilty of facilitating a hostile work environment.

If you think this is overblown hype and not a real risk, consider this: according to a Nielsen Online study, a full 25 percent of employees who have Internet access visit porn sites during the workday. In fact, traffic to these sites actually peaks during work hours.

Do you want to take another look at what’s on your network?

What about Outbound Traffic?