As organisations increasingly turn to social networks for sharing business-related information with customers, partners and employees, the risk of publishing confidential information also increases.
“It is, therefore, more important than ever for companies to have controls in place to capture social information to comply with open records request, have supervisory requirements under the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in place and the eventuality of an eDiscovery request,' says Mr Vijay Mhaskar, Vice-President (Information Management Group), Symantec.
Citing a Gartner report, he said: “By end of 2013, 50 per cent of all companies will be asked to produce material from social media sites for eDiscovery. Only an archiving software solution would in that case help organisations permit employees use social media for business purposes, enable the preservation, search and discovery of specific content from networking Web sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SharePoint and blogs.”
“IT departments have good reason to worry as the social costs of such social media incidents is said to cost a company over $4 billion in the past twelve months,” he said, citing a tweet. Sharing the company's “2011 Social Media Protection Flash Poll” findings, he said “a typical enterprise experienced nine social media incidents such as posting of confidential information in public domain, damage to reputation, loss of customer trust, data loss and revenue loss among others.
TRAINING EMPLOYEES
Symantec suggests that like all corporate communications, enterprises define how to use the social media and train employees on content posting and implement policies to address regulations. “Enterprises should consider an archiving solution and implementing data loss prevention solution to prevent proprietary information from bleeding out of the company onto social networks,” he added.
The findings showed that enterprises that failed to preserve social networking business content faced the risk of increased litigation costs and damage to reputation.