Despite IT Efforts, Corporate P2P Use Rampant

IT managers just aren’t getting the message across when it comes to stopping employees from

downloading music, videos and movies on the corporate network.

”Whatever IT has been doing to date to warn against this, hasn’t been sufficient,” says

Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, an industry analyst firm based in Nashua, N.H.

”Perhaps warnings haven’t been explicit enough. Perhaps more technical approaches are

needed since it seems you can’t depend on individuals doing what they’re told.”

And the numbers back up the analysts’ warnings that Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications are

still plaguing corporate networks, clogging up bandwidth, slowing employee productivity and

leaving companies wide open to myriad lawsuits.

AssetMetrix Research Labs, an IT asset analyst firm based in Ottawa, Canada, reports today

that a recent study found that P2P applications were found in 77 percent of all companies.

The report also notes that some companies have P2P applications on as many as 58 percent of

their PCs, and no company with more than 500 PCs was found to be P2P free.

”In the wake of recent announcements by the Recording Industry Association of America, the

issue of file-sharing applications is becoming a prime concern for corporations,” says Paul

Bodnoff, president of AssetMetrix. Bodnoff points out that a recent US Federal court ruling

gives the RIAA the subpoena power to force an ISP to identify a subscriber who has been

identified downloading copyrighted material, whether movies, music or software programs,
using P2P applications.

AssetMetrix’ report also notes that a company with 1,000 PCs may have more than 80 users of

P2P applications, with hundreds of Gigabytes of downloaded and potentially

copyright-infringing music, movies and software.

”Everybody is doing it and it’s a huge risk,” says Dan Woolley, a vice president at

network security company SilentRunner. ”They don’t have the high-speed networks at home, so

they do it at lunch or when the boss is away. You can find a lot of people spending a lot of

time downloading things from the Web.”

And Woolley adds that it’s an issue of lost productivity, copyright violations and wasted

bandwidth. And if employees are downloading pornography, it raises sexual harassment issues.

”How many people never use the office telephone to call home,” says Woolley. ”People

don’t look at it as abusing corporate resources but they’re tying up the network.”

Woolley and Haff agree that it’s long past time for companies to set up strict policies

about using P2P applications for non-work-related activities, and for Internet usage in

general. They also recommend making sure employees are educated about the problems they can

cause the company, as well as about the policies in place and the punishments related to

them. And they also recommend installing software that block ports or scan PCs to keep P2P

applications off the corporate network.

”You would have thought the word would have gotten out a bit better by now,” says Haff.

”If the usage is as widespread as it appears, then this is a real problem.”

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020

• Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 05, 2020

• The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  August 14, 2020