Typical Reasons That IM Management Systems Are Implemented
As instant messaging becomes more prevalent in business, corporations and organizations must apply the same rigor to the use of IM as they have previously done for email. In particular, there are four categories of risk or liability that companies face as a result of their employees' day-to-day use of IM:
- Risk of infection by virus, spyware, or other malware installed surreptitiously over an IM network or in an IM-attached file.
- Risk of employees using IM to communicate trade secrets (proprietary, confidential, or restricted information) to parties outside the organization. This category is often called "data leakage" or "information leakage".
- Risk of employees using IM to harass or threaten other employees. For example, the persistent use of IM by one employee to send messages to another employee that are sexual and/or unwanted in nature may create a hostile environment sexual harassment liability for the employer. A March 2007 survey by Akonix Systems identified that over 30% of employees had been harassed over IM in the workplace.
- Risk of being out of compliance with governmental laws and regulations governing electronic communications. This category typically involves the need to create and manage an archive of instant messages in order to comply with such regulations as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, electronic discovery, or the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the United States, and similar legislation and policy in other countries. Sixty-eight percent of IT managers have archiving and retrieval methods for corporate email. About half that many — 31 percent — store IM communications.
All of these risks exist for organizational entities, regardless of whether their employees are using company-provided instant messaging (e.g. IBM Lotus Sametime or Microsoft Office Live Communications Server) or unsanctioned access to the public IM networks (e.g. AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, or Yahoo! Messenger).
Read more about this topic: Instant Messaging Manager
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