Cisco completed a very interesting report regarding social networking sites and companies. Taking several countries as reference, around 52% of organizations block social networking applications and collaboration tools; with the main differential in India, where the 96% IT administrators and decision makers block this content. The complete study took 10 different countries around the globe, and the main reason for organization to block any of these applications or tools reside in security matters or in the “lack of education with these tools”. But that’s not all, the study also shows that around 50% of the users actually ignore company policy and 27% of those admit that they usually get a workaround by changing some settings to get access to those sites and applications (I’m pretty sure that the 27% is a lot bigger). Around 2023 users and 1021 IT administrators and decision makers completed this research. What about your company? Do they block some content or applications to end-users?

1. NO ACCESS
Roughly half (52%) of IT decision makers say their company has a policy
prohibiting use of social media applications or collaboration tools.
96
64 61 62
52 51
46 44 41
34
21
Total US UK France Germany Spain Italy Russia India China Japan
Figures indicate percentage of IT decision makers saying they bar use of social media tools in the workplace. Source: Cisco