Reducing the Risks of Social Media to Your Organization

Social media offers important business advantages to companies and organizations, but also has well-known security risks. In order to mitigate these security risks and still enjoy the benefits of social media organizations must establish and enforce good social media usage policies. But many organizations are unsure of how to develop effective social media policies. Instead, many organizations either simply prohibit social media use altogether, or have no policy at all regarding social media use. Both of these approaches are unsatisfactory. Organizations that do not adopt social media fail to reap its significant benefits and are at a disadvantage to their competitors that do. Organizations that simply allow social media use without any policies or guidelines open themselves to security threats. This paper is intended to demonstrate that the existing information security policies already in place at many organizations can easily be extended to cover social media. Therefore, organizations do not need to issue security policies and guidelines specifically for social media. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the main security threats posed by social media would be addressed by a good overall security awareness program, along with and technical and administrative safeguards.