WorkLight secures Facebook for enterprises
Social networks are growing like weeds. This creates a difficult weeding problem for enterprises, who fear adverse impact from employees spending time and sharing company info in Facebook groups, which aren't protected by corporate firewalls.
Context & Ripple Effects
The question of whether Facebook belongs inside the office has been running all year: a June 2007 Between the Lines piece argued that Facebook itself is the enterprise social network, and an August Read/WriteWeb debate weighed whether workplace Facebook use is slacking or networking. What neither resolved was the security objection — employee activity in Facebook groups sits outside corporate firewalls, where company information can leak.
WorkLight's move answers that objection directly by securing Facebook for enterprise use, effectively letting IT departments govern consumer-network access instead of banning it. It is one of the first concrete products to convert the year's abstract anxiety into a deployable control.
First-order effects
- Enterprises that were blocking or tolerating ungoverned Facebook use gain a way to allow it under corporate security policy, shifting the decision from blanket prohibition to managed access.
- WorkLight positions itself as the security middleware layer between consumer social networks and the corporate firewall, a category that barely existed before this year's enterprise-Facebook debate.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise collaboration and security vendors now face pressure to offer comparable controls for consumer networks, or risk losing the governance role to specialists like WorkLight.
- IT departments' procurement calculus changes: instead of choosing between an internal-only intranet and open access, they can buy a wrapper around the consumer service employees already use, undercutting demand for separate corporate social-networking suites.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer web services will enter the enterprise through third-party governance layers rather than through walled corporate clones — an early instance of IT departments adapting to employee-chosen tools instead of dictating them.
- The arrangement makes network operators like Facebook dependent on intermediaries for enterprise legitimacy, foreshadowing a market where compliance and identity layers sit between platforms and their business users.
The trend: Consumer social networks are entering the workplace not as sanctioned corporate platforms but through third-party security wrappers that reconcile employee behavior with firewall-bound IT policy.