The increasing use of social media platforms has made us well informed and connected, but on the other had it has also introduced various challenges in our professional lives. These challenges are primarily related to our productivity and increased risks to vital information of our enterprises.

Awareness Technologies Inc.(ATI), a provider of Unified Insider Threat Prevention solutions on Software as a Service (SaaS) basis, put out on the press services the announcement of its new study that analyzes the most important employee productivity and security trends that have affected businesses throughout the year 2011.

According to the new study, people’s work culture is being considerably altered by a number of economic and technological factors. These include homes enabled with mobile connectivity; people working while moving; continuously rising use of contractors and the seamless integration of professional and personal lives of the people through social media. The study suggests that due to these trends, enterprises are facing new security related worries while trying to confine their productivity loss and insider threats.

“Looking back at the big trends and events that occurred this year, we witnessed a major boom in social media and how it increasingly became involved in every aspect of our daily lives,” said Ron Penna , Chief Strategy Officer at ATI, the only provider of Complete Insider Threat Security On-Demand. “With enterprises allowing their employees to work remotely, access to personal laptops and confidential information, employee productivity and security were major concerns for businesses all around.”

Emphasizing that enterprises need to adopt effective policies for keeping a vigilant eye upon employee productivity and use of social media within the office premises, the new study by ATI states that insider risks are highly to emerge as a result of the exposure of professional information and even confidential data through various social media platforms. Also, an enterprise that allows its employees to work remotely promotes more use of social media tools and leakage of sensitive data as well, adds the study.

Services offered by Awareness Technologies enable its customers to access five technologies —Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Web Filtering, Employee Monitoring, Laptop recovery and Mobile Monitoring — from within a single agent download and control console. More than 10,000 enterprises throughout the world deploy solutions offered by Awareness Technologies Inc. for protecting their data from insider threats.

In November 2011, Awareness Technologies Inc. announced that it was named to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s “Top 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies” for the second consecutive year. The Company noted that the list is composed of the fastest growing companies in the Los Angeles area based on revenue growth.