Facebook Top Site Accessed by Enterprise Employees

By Stephanie Jordan
in

In its Q2 2012 State of the Web report, cloud security company Zscaler discussed web applications most commonly accessed by enterprise employees. Facebook was found to be the most dominant web app.

According to Zscaler ThreatLabZ researchers “Facebook broke its five quarter downward trend for enterprise traffic in Q2, increasing from 41 percent of web app use in Q1 to 42.25 percent in Q2, despite rocky IPO and subsequent PR challenges in May.” Facebook, while dominant, has been on the decline since Q1 2011 when it represented 52.40 percent of web application traffic, per the report.

The other top web applications accessed by enterprise employees in Q2: Gmail at 15.29 percent, YouTube at 9.08 percent and Twitter at 7.35 percent. In much smaller increments were MSM Messenger representing 2.69 percent of traffic, Facebook IM at 2.66 percent, Hotmail at 2.35 percent, Yahoo Mail at 1.86 percent, Google search at 1.41 percent, Linkedin at 1.34 and Blogger at 1.10 percent.

The company also observed web usage from mobile devices overall is up, with Apple iOS leading over Android and Blackberry. Over the months of April, May and June, Blackberry use declined from 11.82 percent in April to 7.75 percent in June. In contrast, Apple iOS saw a rise from 52.67 percent of total mobile device use in April to 55.36 percent in June. Android remained relatively steady from 35.51 percent in April to 36.88 in June.

At the end of the report (PDF) Zscaler ThreatLabZ authors caution: “As is often the case, many come in contact with malware by just doing normal activity on the web, such as clicking on a top Google search result or visiting a known legitimate page.”

It is useful for IT Administrators to know and track what sites employees are visiting and what BYOD mobile devices are in use within the enterprise in order to set up acceptable use policies and to safeguard enterprise networks.

Published August 31, 2012