An article review.

As reliance on web based conferencing grows, companies must assess the risk associated with using the technology.

We’re all using web conferencing tools to reduce travel costs and increase communication. Like any other technology, the tools come with risks. A recent study by Forrester Research surveyed “150 regulated and nonregulated organizations in North America to evaluate market/adoption trends, the benefits of moving to a private cloud, and best practices for doing so.”

The study found several crucial trends. The first is the growing importance of this technology within business-critical meetings. Moreover, the obvious concern is the content of these meetings. The study revealed several interesting statistics regarding usual meeting content.

• Nearly 40% of online meetings share financial data.
• One third of meetings share “private customer or patient information.”
• One in five meetings reference some sort of trade secret.

The type of conferencing solution used by companies was also studied. The survey sought to differentiate on-premise solutions and cloud-based solutions. It also examined their security, performance, and cost implications. Based on the analysis, the study offers several recommendations for better mitigation of the risk associated with using web conferencing.

• Use on-premise web conferencing solutions for both security and performance.
• Take the time to understand the total cost of ownership of different solutions.
• Consider hybrid solutions based on employee needs.

As always, it starts with a risk assessment. Are your vendors properly managing your web conferences? Ask them if you can have a password on the session, and see how they respond? Meanwhile, do you realize that anybody attending the session has the ability to record the session . . . and later return to zoom in on results?

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The above is what we call an “Article Review.” It is part of our attempt to help our readers find excellent reading materials to back up important technology risk management concepts. We try not to include articles that are merely news or additional news about mainstream issues. Instead, we try to highlight articles that our “typical clients” should be sure to read, or that are about concepts “outside the mainstream media.” infotex does not intend to endorse views represented by the writers of the articles we review, nor do we try to keep our Clients aware of EVERYTHING. For example, if a particular story concept is being reported upon in many different media sources, infotex usually chooses to ignore the story concept altogether, unless we can find a “unique take” on the story concept.