Does Your Employer Ban Skype?

neutralino asks: "This morning, we received an company-wide email stating that the Max Planck Society (a German government funded research organization) has outlawed the use of P2P software at all of its institutes (including ours). The statement specifically singled out the use of Skype for internet telephony. The reasons given for this were that 'the exchanged data cannot be controlled' (therefore it might be illegal) and that 'Max-Planck or research resources in general might be abused, if "only" for commercial purposes.' This caught us by surprise, since many of us use VoIP to communicate with friends and family and collaborators, in our respective home countries. Is it now standard practice for companies, government organizations, and universities to outlaw Skype? Should it be?"

Comments

Skype for business.

[rmadmin]

My employer (which is pretty small, but spread out) currently embraces skype for free voice communications between our many offices and telecommuniting employees. My employer also embraces most OSS software not only for the fact that it is more cost effective in most situations, but our inhouse programers can tweak the crap out of it.

If Skype went evil

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

then it would be the perfect spyware.

The perfect spyware would punch through firewalls. Skype does just that for its legitimate purposes.

The perfect spyware would encrypt its outgoing communication. Skype does also.

The perfect spyware would be a program with plausible-sounding reasons to connect to unknown computers without notice. Skype has to do just that to take advantage of its supernode system.

The perfect spyware would be hard to reverse engineer. Skype refuses to run under SoftICE (apparently to inhibit development of competing clients).

In our own real world, Skype's been minding its own business. Nobody's lost a machine due to having Skype on it (at least not since the callto: buffer overflow). Nobody's reported suspicious activity in filemon while Skype was running. By normal standards it's trustworthy. But to a business which lives by "you can EXpect what you INspect" Skype is a terrifying unknown.

My employer *requires* skype

[Anonymous Coward]

We have offices in 3 states and 2 countries; and long-distance charges were actually a significant expense.

Last year, we started recommending that employees use Skype for most routine meetings (most sensitive meetings are still recommended to use phone lines since people questioned Skype's author's previous company's business model).

Why skype? It was the best cross-platform (Mac & Windows & Linux) voice conference system we could find.

Re:My employer *requires* skype

[luvirini]

17 countries 22 offices... communication solution within company and partners(more than 500 worldwide): Skype.

End result: Huge savings.

We could ofcourse have used some other VOIP solution for the actual communication inside the company, but with the large partnernetwork needed a solution that people will be happy to adopt.. as they can use it for other communications too not only with us.

Banned in certain countries

[matt_wilts]

My employer bans it, and one of the reasons is that *any* type of VoIP system is banned in some of the countries we do business in (UAE being one of them). If the ISP in the region (effectively a state monopoly) found evidence of VoIP on their links, then they'd cut the links, simple as that. Interestingly, we examined the ToS of the link in UAE & we believe it's actually a criminal offence to use VoIP services on the connection we have.

Re:Banned in certain countries

[luvirini]

There is a Huge difference in UAE depending if you have to use Etisalat or one of other ISPs, Etisalat blocks/filters/forbids a lot whereas the others do not. (Note that you cannot choose ISP, it depends on your location and in 99% of cases Etisalat, but I know of atleast 3 types of exceptions). And yes, if you use Etisalat connection against the ToS, it may be criminal offence.

Re:And make sure to keep it to work.

[finkployd]

I'm a huge fan of privacy, but where on earth do people get the idea they have free reign to privately use company resources? Some companies are cool about this sort of thing but there is certainly no "right" to make private, personal use of company network and phone systems.

Finkployd

Yes and no

[onebuttonmouse]

I work in the IT department of a local authority. We don't 'ban' Skype as such, but it is blocked at the firewall just like any other non-essential traffic. Out of several thousand users we have had two or three requests to use Skype, which we've complied with. If we had hundreds of requests we'd have to review the situation, since we obviously have limited bandwidth just like everyone else.

Ban it? We require it.

[ObjetDart]

I work for a small software company that is widely distributed; we have developers in 3 different countries and 5 different time zones. We use Skype almost exclusively for all of our voice communication as well as for casual IM'ing. Every employee is required to install Skype and create and publish a Skype ID. I can't even imagine how much time and money we save this way.

Re:Of course

[arivanov]

Well...

As far as eating traffic if you only freeload (no local P2P supernodes) it eats 10-20% less traffic compared to an OpenVPN or IPSEC tunnel with a G729 call with VAD turned on. So if it is only one conversation Skype is more economical. Problem is elsewhere. If there are multiple conversations between people from the same company they traverse the company NAT to the sometimes different supernodes as relays and back. This is what wastes bandwidth.

On top of that Skype especially in a NAT environment is horrible to QoS. If you are obliged to provide a working VOIP environment this is the worst possible protocol. There is no protocol spec, there is no documentation, there is no way to keep state, there is no way to kill specific conversations to keep within bandwidth limits, so on so fourth.

To add to that, in a company environment it is important to have the VOIP integrate cleanly with the company directory, possibly CRM, voicemail, etc. You do not get anything even close with Skype. You get that from any VOIP PBX. Even Asterisk has that on offer. On top of that in many cases you are obliged to keep at least call records for compliance (if not the entire conversations). Nothing like that with Skype.

It is a good toy for the end-user masses. It should be banned in a company. If a company allows Skype this means that the sysadmin has no clue on all of the following counts - security, compliance, telephony, network/QoS.

My Employer forces us to use Skype

[Foggerty]

Since we have an internet setup with unlimited bandwidth, there's no cost overhead for using Skype. And not to pimp Skype or anything, but we've saved a couple of grand a month on phone bills :-)
(We have offices in three countries, so we make a LOT of overseas calls just within the company.)

Re:Of course they do ...

[JamesTRexx]

would far rather throw truck loads of money at AT&T

This is exactly the reason we're banning Skype because it takes up Way too much bandwidth. The largest company is using it and they say it saves them a lot of money on phone bills, but thanks to them we spend all those savings on data communication lines.
Skype can save money, but only if it's more than what you need to pay for increased bandwidth.