When you have information of strategic business value, security of that data and information quite naturally becomes a major concern. Whether it’s the enterprise systems, the CRM data, the office intranet, or the business website, security is an issue that needs consideration -- and businesses do keep it in mind while implementing any new technology.

Nearly every business has some kind of a confidentiality agreement between its vendors or customers and a similar agreement for its employees. The objective is to prevent leaks of confidential information that could fall into the wrong hands -- and several decades of experience has helped businesses secure this information and what is shared internally within the organization from the outside world.  But, there is a new challenge looming.

Much of the communication and daily collaboration that used to happen between employees face-to-face has moved online. Moved to instant messengers, emails, online forums and social networks. This is great in the sense that it enables everyone within an organization to communicate and collaborate more efficiently using these technologies -- and it’s risky because this is the kind of information a business would like to be able to protect and it’s all posted to a place beyond their control.

There are several possible scenarios where the business is vulnerable, simply because communication happens ‘outside it’s walls’ so to speak. It could be as simple as two employees in a company having a discussion on their Facebook walls about a new potential customer their company is in talks with while a mutual friend of theirs on the sales team of a rival company gets the inside view which helps them make a better pitch for the same requirement. It’s a scary thought but a highly likely scenario.

It’s not just Facebook and common social networks that are vulnerable to privacy and security issues for business collaboration. There are employee blogs where frustration and internal goings on can be vented, there are online discussion groups and forums which teams may have set up across various websites, public Wikis and applications like Twitter where again it’s not so difficult to search for information and discussion between employees.

When the collaboration and communication platforms employees use are spread across so many different websites, staying on top of privacy and information security is not an easy task. More often than not, it’s beyond administrative control. Yet, restricting or completely avoiding the use of these great technologies is not helpful either, and social software platforms are the way forward with business collaboration.

Having your social software a little closer to home, or in case of businesses, consolidating it around the business website itself helps minimize that risk of leaks. Having social software integrated into a business portal with restricted access and a centralized administration interface across membership, blogs, Wikis, messaging, and other features helps keep some amount of control and lets a business secure their business collaboration and communication environment to some degree.

Simply having a separate portal or platform for employees to use at work encourages consolidating all business related communicational and sensitive data sharing within that environment -- and that alone significantly reduces risk. It’s always easier to “manage” something on your own servers and website than it is to manage what happens on other sites.

It’s also easier to formulate some kind of privacy policy and implement measure where certain discussion groups are more restricted and other best practices are used when the interaction all happens within your own business portal or intranet. Eventually, privacy and security concerns are spread across several areas and need to be tackled regularly. One good place to start would be online. After all, that’s where most of the communication and information exchange is happening.