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Skype – Great opportunity or a threat?
 Skype, the company that eBay paid £1.4B to acquire last September is continuing to gain ground in enterprises as users deploy it on their PCs with or without management approval. As it comes to your organisation, should you embrace it and its benefits or attempt to stop its progress?
Skype is a public voice over IP (VoIP) application that allows its users to call each other from PC to PC for no charge and set up conference calls between multiple users. It also offers very low cost calls to standard telephones via its technology called Skype-out, calling in to the service (Skype-in), voicemail, instant messaging, file transfer and video calling. Its web site shows that there have been over 250 million downloads worldwide.
It is a very clever piece of technology; the phone service requires very small amounts of bandwidth, all data is encrypted and it can get around most attempts to block it from packet-based devices such as firewalls, it even uses other PCs running Skype as the next hop in its communications. When I travel, I often turn on my PC in a hotel room and without signing up for the hotel’s Internet service, things like standard browsing, IM and VPNs are usually blocked. However if I leave my PC on for a few minutes, Skype finds a way out of the building and I can connect to my Skype “buddies” around the world.
Its benefits are clear to the cost-conscious organisation or anyone making calls worldwide. I talk a lot to colleagues in Asia and for the last few months almost all of these have been via Skype and therefore free. Skype also shows “presence”, so you know when your buddies are at their PC, just like Instant Messager applications from AOL, Yahoo! And MSN.
The drawbacks though, are also similar to IM technologies. Firstly, there’s no central log of calls from an organisation, the file transfer is peer-to-peer, so doesn’t go through the organisation’s email service for virus-scanning, logging and content control, so viruses and spyware can enter while confidential information can leave an organisation. The voice and video calls cannot be recorded because the encryption is proprietary, making it impossible to use Skype in an organisation that needs to follow financial regulations on communication logging.
My view is that Skype will follow the typical “Technology Paranoia Curve” – the same curve that has been followed by email, web browsing, IM and other technologies – as time goes on and more people deploy it, organisations will move through the following phases:
DENIAL: “There’s none of it here”
CONCERN: “We have told our users not to use it”
TERROR: “This is a threat – block it”
ACCEPTANCE: “It has some good points, give me appropriate controls”
So management needs to decide whether the benefits overcome the drawbacks and set appropriate policies within the organisation. If it is decided to block Skype, firewalls need to work in conjunction with proxies to provide a block as firewalls on their own are unable to provide a complete block. It may be decided that specific regions or groups of users are allowed access and happily the technology is now available to provide this level of control by user or group.
06/2006, Nigel Hawthorn
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