A very interesting pattern has emerged over the last five years, which is both empowering companies and threatening their security at the same time.
In the old days, employees were dependent on their corporate IT department to provide the functionality they used in their day-to-day work activities. These employees were at the mercy of the IT department to provide access to the data, systems, and tools required to be productive.
Then about six years ago, a revolution began to take shape, and some very interesting corporate behavioral patterns emerged. Companies like Google and Box, Yammer and YouTube, started offering a world of functionality that was readily available and cheap. A manager could throw down a corporate credit card and purchase a full suite of back office functionality for their team that was mobile-enabled, location independent, and 100% under their control.
This new technology opened a world of possibilities to employees who were then free to begin collaborating and creating without the restrictions that normally stifled them. Employees started using video in multiple ways, such as:
• Retail employees began showing videos of their latest displays via YouTube and Box.
• Corporate buyers created private Facebook sites to share videos, and collaborate socially pertaining to products and merchandising strategies.
• Doctors began to provide tele-medicine to rural areas via Skype.
Employees were no longer dependent on the rules and restrictions of an inflexible IT paradigm. The amazing part was that many of these cloud services were inexpensive if not free. As this pattern began to expand, however, terabytes of data that were once protected behind the hollowed walls of corporate data centers were suddenly distributed across the new Cloud universe, causing some major problems in the enterprise. As we stated in the past, enterprises are now faced with the “wild west” of user-generated content and enterprise video.
Intellectual property is easily lost in the vastness of the cloud and provides no real long-term value to the organization that invested in its creation. Assets that cannot be easily located and utilized by all relevant employees are of no value to the company as a whole.
In addition, those assets are a potential liability in the event that competitors or the press locate them. Internal privacy and legal departments have no insight into potential liability and are often blindsided by content distributed on the Web. An employee who uploaded a video, which they perceived to be harmless, could easily be the primary catalyst for litigation.
How does this problem get solved?
There are a couple of things IT can do to wrangle some control over their corporate videos and user-generated content. The first step is providing a clear policy for video and user-generated content that is signed by all employees.
More and more, you see enterprises moving to cloud-based solutions. In fact, according to Gartner, cloud computing is one of the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015. Providing enterprise solutions that are flexible, easily accessible, mobile enabled and easy to use will help employees adopt enterprise content management software. Having applications that ensure the security and searchability of enterprise video assets within one CMS platform of record is a bonus.
Being one technological step ahead of these employees, will save IT headaches.
