Leader: Give Skype a break

Our recent story about whether businesses should ban Skype because of the threat it poses to corporate networks generated some quality feedback.

As pointed out by a few readers - including Butler Group analyst Richard Edwards - businesses should be less concerned about Skype circumnavigating their firewall and more concerned about the voice over IP application turning their systems into 'supernodes', the machines Skype co-opts to connect users on either end of a call.

Unless you're monitoring network traffic, you might not even know your computer has become a supernode.

At the same time, Skype calls are free or cheap so it could be seen as a pretty fair trade - use of some of your processing power and bandwidth in exchange for cheap calls for everyone. And all this supernode business is outlined in the Skype user agreement, so no one can say they weren't warned.

Before businesses start complaining about Skype, they must remember it has never claimed to be an enterprise product. CEO Niklas Zennström has told us point-blank he's never intended to compete with the corporate VoIP players - the Avayas, Ciscos and Nortels. Skype spread virally and some people liked using it at home so much they thought it could also help them out at work.

Which brings us to the deeper trend at play here - something IT directors have every reason to be cautious about: the migration of software into the enterprise that was never designed for the enterprise.

As Butler Group's Edwards put it: "We take technology from the home into the office now. Ten years ago, we took technology from the office into the home. Progress is working the opposite way now."

Skype is nothing to be afraid of. If businesses are uncomfortable with their systems becoming supernodes or the other potential security threats, their IT directors should keep a close eye on network traffic or ban Skype's use at the office - and chose a VoIP product intended for corporate use.

But the truth is that for most home users and many businesses - especially of the smaller variety - Skype is no more of a risk than any other P2P app or IM or even email. Which means something could go wrong, sure, but by employing the proper precautions the chances are pretty low.