The48-hour failure of Skype's internet telephony service
earlier this monthhas highlighted the risks
of using free web-based services in a business
environment.
Jan Dawson, vice-president of US enterprise practice at analyst
firm
Ovum, said Skype was appropriate for occasional use by
businesses, but it should not be used for mission-critical
communications.
Dawson said that the failure should be a wake-up call for
businesses. "This will remind users what they are really dealing
with here. Arguably, those businesses have been living on borrowed
time until now, although they have undoubtedly saved a lot of money
in the process."
In a paper released earlier this year, analyst firm Gartner
urged companies that allow end-users to run Skype to develop and
disseminate a security policy regarding acceptable use and the
consequences of misuse.
Gartner has recommended keeping Skype traffic off internal
corporate networks as a best practice, as differentiating Skype
traffic from
data leakage is almost impossible.
Gartner research director Lawrence Orans said, "Skype traffic is
encrypted, which blinds network-based intrusion prevention, content
monitoring and filtering approaches. Skype's protocol also does not
use a dedicated port - it attempts to use any port that the
firewall is not blocking. This behaviour may trigger data-leakage
sensors."
Use of free web services has major implications for business
users. Roy Illsley, senior research analyst at Butler Group, said,
"Free web-service based applications like Skype are not yet mature
enough for rigorous business use." Such services work for the
casual business user, but lack the service levels needed for a true
business service, he said.
Over time, Illsley predicted that businesses would make more use
of web-based services, especially as products are developed that
provide business users with service-level agreements.
Illsley said one such service was
Spiceworks, a free
web-based IT helpdesk management tool for small and medium-sized
businesses, which is paid for through site advertising.
Reasons behind the outage
Skype said the failure was due to problems in its
peer-to-peer network software, combined with the effects of
Microsoft's monthly patch update.
The Microsoft patch update forced Skype users to reboot their
PCs and reconnect to Skype, which led to a spike in the number of
users trying to log in. Skype was unable to cope with the log-in
requests because of problems it was experiencing in its
peer-to-peer network.
The company's website stated, "We would like to reassure our
users across the globe that we have done everything we need to do
to make sure this does not happen again. We have already introduced
a number of improvements to our software to ensure our users will
not be similarly affected - in the unlikely possibility of this
combination of events recurring."