Google Apps, Facebook Devour Enterprise Network Bandwidth

By Clint Boulton

Palo Alto Networks looked at 750 applications used in nearly 350 companies from September 2009 through March 2010.

Palo Alto Networks focused on retail, health care, professional services and other businesses in Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific regions for this study. The study looked at how networks are being used, what applications are running on enterprise networks and the risks associated with the Web applications used in those businesses.

Webmail, instant messaging, social networking and file sharing are all being used with equal consistency. No particular geography is different from another in terms of application usage.

Financial services, universities and health care all show similar usage patterns.

Social networking applications such as Facebook may be a prerequisite for university life, but they pose risks in other industries with stringent data regulation.

IM applications were detected in over 90 percent of the health care and financial services organizations.

Some 35 different social networking applications were detected.

Peer-to-peer and browser-based file-sharing applications were used with relatively high frequency in the financial services and health care industries.

Led by Gmail, 26 browser-based e-mail clients were found in both financial services and health care industries.

To these apps, according to Palo Alto Networks.

Palo Alto Networks identifies 22 Google applications in use, including Google Docs, Analytics, Calendar, Orkut, Gmail, Gtalk, Voice, YouTube, Picasa and Google Wave.