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Kill IM—or at Least Control It

Simply allowing any employee to install and use open instant messaging means malware, phishing, viruses, and other kinds of bad bits.

By Dave Gradijan

This certainly provides many of the internal advantages: security scanning, traffic monitoring, auditing, and usually much better reporting. But you do have to watch out for client compatibility and other issues. Don’t glom onto a hosted service that restricts your users to only one client when your customers might be using any kind of client, for example. There are ways around this, so discuss them with the hosting provider before dropping any moola.

Overall, I’m still a big proponent of the "just say no" approach to IM. If you don’t need, don’t allow it. But because more and more folks do need it, weighing the benefits of something such as OCS in-house or MessageLabs out-of-house are your best options. But you can’t ignore it. Ignoring just makes it worse tomorrow.

— Oliver Rist, InfoWorld

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