Instant Messengers have always found ‘reluctant’ acceptance in organizations. However, organizations have sensed the utility & efficiency of IMs and today, they are the “unofficial” tool of instant communication among corporate users.

Instant Messengers: The Life-line of Businesses Communication
IMs add immediacy and efficiency to business communication and information sharing. For a business, this means quicker decision-making and operations that improves productivity and team work too.

Why are Public IMs carrying the “unofficial” tag in Organizations?
Most of the widely used IMs like Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger run on public networks and lack the much-needed controls and management. They fail to offer audit logs and reports on IM that poses a big risk to sensitive corporate information that may travel through IMs. For instance, an employee can share an application password, say the web-based CRM tool password, with a team member over IM that can open up the entire customer database of an organization to a competitor. In absence of user-activity logs and reports over IMs, the organization has no way of knowing about data going out of its network. The lack of trail on employees’ IM activities by IT administrators encourages employees to get involved in idle chat, bringing down office productivity. Besides this, lack of control, monitoring, log records and unsecure IM sessions weaken an organization’s hold on satisfying legal and compliance requirements.

Taming Public IMs
Public IMs can be tamed to give the security of private IMs with Instant Messenger management tools that allow organizations to apply controls over public IMs viz. who will be allowed access to IMs, whom they can communicate with, guidelines on prohibitive IM activities, and more that will help in deriving benefits of productivity and data security.

Cyberoam’s Instant Messaging Archiving & Controls
Cyberoam UTM offers identity-based IM controls for Yahoo messenger and Windows Live Messenger. It can scan, log and control access, conversation, file transfer, and audio/video chat between users and user groups in the network. A user can be denied access to IM by his username or his IM address. File transfer over IMs can be blocked by applying identity-based policies for users. Use of specific keywords e.g. business plan, server password etc can be blocked over IMs to secure sensitive data. Cyberoam’s IM controls offer logs of chat communication between users that IT administrators can review and filter in case of security breach issues.

Cyberoam thus allows organizations to enjoy the benefits of Public IMs while avoiding the risks related to productivity loss and data leakage. In other words, it makes the Public IM private for you.