Management
Instant messaging is one of the most popular communications tools today and many employees rely on it daily to communicate in real-time with co-workers, customers, and business partner, as well as the occasional chat with family and friends. According to Osterman Research, over 90% of enterprises have users accessing IM and Giga Group estimates that IM will be used more than email by 2006. Such pervasive use and explosive group present challenges for today's IT organizations as they try to meet their users requirements for unfettered access to IM to continue to realize the productivity benefits provided by IM while at the same time protecting their networks from attacks and stopping the inappropriate use of IM. Not surprisingly, Yankee Group believes that the management and securing of IM is a "top 3 priority" for IT managers in 2004.
Akonix Systems provides the tools necessary to manage the use of both public and enterprise IM to ensure that IM is used appropriately and productively throughout the enterprise and to provide the reporting required for monitoring of adherence with policies on its use and billing business units or other internal users for its management.
Benefits include:
Manage identities of public and enterprise IM users
- Directory synchronization - import users from Active Directory, LDAP, Novell eDirectory and other directory services
- Domain ownership - license domain from public service providers to ensure control of corporate IM addresses
- Screen name policy enforcement - ensure all screen names used by employees follow consistent pattern (such as name@company.com)
Define policies for the appropriate use of IM
- Granular policy management - content and keyword filtering, foul language filters and other policies for ensuring against the inappropriate use of IM
- File transfer control - define company-wide or more granular permissions for the ability to transfer files over IM and scan files for viruses
- Ethical walls - set rules on who can talk with whom to block any unwanted conversations
Log, report and bill back for usage
- Robust logging - capture entire conversations and keys message statistics, such as network, user name and network identity
- Comprehensive reporting - generate usage reports by group or domain to bill back business units for IM access or account activity
Leverage existing network infrastructure
- Integrate with Check Point and Microsoft ISA firewalls - plug into existing firewalls to route traffic to L7 Enterprise
- Plug into archiving solution - send IM logs to existing archive solution, such as KVS, iLumin, and Legato, to centrally manage all archived messages
Maintain current end user behavior
- Utilize existing IM clients - allow users to continue to use the application clients they access today, such as AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger
- Require no desktop touch - deploy with simple network change without any access to the end user desktop
Prevent unauthorized use of IM
- Block unauthorized access - stop users from inadvertently or intentionally circumventing IM management
- Stop Kazaa, BitTorrent and other P2P applications - provide managed access to collaborative tools by allowing controlled access to IM while blocking unproductive file sharing P2P applications
