Enterprise IT people like to dismiss the potential acceptance of Google applications in large corporations. After all, as Microsoft frequently points out Office is the de factor standard for productivity applications in the enterprise.
But now word comes of Google applications penetration into the enterprise from an unlikely quarter. Palo Alto Networks, a security startup company based in Alviso, Calif., commissioned a study to show how dramatically the application landscape is changing within corporation in order to illustrate that existing security tools just aren't getting the job done.
According to a study of 20 large IT organizations that tracked the behavior of 350,000 users for six months, Google applications such as Google Docs and Google Desktop are in use at 60 percent of the 20 sites surveyed.
The study went on to show that all manner of peer-to-peer file sharing applications were in use at these sites while 30 percent of the sites were found to be using online file transfer and storage applications as well.
In short what this says beyond the implicit security risks implied is that users are finding that existing corporate applications are woefully inadequate for their needs. While it's probably true that a lot of this activity may not have anything to do with their jobs, there is no denying that more and more people are circumventing IT to make use of so-called social networking applications in their jobs.
This presents a tremendous challenge to IT organizations that on the one hand need to control over what data is leaving their networks and where it is actually going. At the same time, it may be a losing battle because most users will actively circumvent IT policies in the name of boosting their own personal productivity.
What all this seems to be crying out for is a set of services that IT organizations can monitor and track without compromising the productivity of their employees. Microsoft is obviously hot on the trail in terms of developing these capabilities, but the question is does this create an opportunity for Google, or for that matter IBM, to trump Microsoft when it comes to creating what is shaping up to be the next generation of corporate collaboration applications.