TORONTO – Although IT professionals have high hopes for the positive impact Gen Y workers will have on the innovation and adoption of technology, they’re also greatly concerned about the security threats that the incoming workforce will pose to their businesses because of Gen Y’s tech-savvy nature.

It’s a double-edged sword, said Elaine Mah, small and mid-sized business marketing manager at Intel of Canada. Intel conducted a survey of IT professionals in the latter half of August, asking them about their opinions and perspectives with regards to Gen Y end-users.

“Really, we wanted to take a look at what’s happening within the IT professional community — their attitudes and perceptions as it related to the incoming Gen Y cohort and what it means to their network,” Mah said.

On the whole, IT professionals exhibited an extremely positive attitude, with 82 percent saying they believe Gen Y as a whole would have a positive impact on their organizations’ use of cutting edge technologies because of their tech-savvy nature. IT professionals indicated that Gen Y workers have creativity, enthusiasm and technology knowledge that will have a positive impact on businesses.

However, that tech-savvy nature cuts both ways.

“So they have no fear where [technology is] concerned. That kind of ‘no fear’ attitude certainly gives IT professionals pause for thought in terms of security concerns in the workplace,” Mah said.

Despite the overall positive impact expected from Gen Y, 50 percent of the IT professionals surveyed said that Gen Y users are a security concern. In fact, IT professionals were twice as likely to say Gen Y users cause more problems, the survey found.

One of the biggest red flags is around Gen Y’s usage of social networking sites and applications, which Mah said poses the highest security threat to the IT infrastructure. Three out of five IT professionals said the downloading of applications and social media tools are the primary security concern related to Gen Y.

However, IT professionals are taking a realistic and flexible look at security policies and technology. Almost 40 percent of IT professionals recognized that technology is continuing to evolve and have already made changes to IT policies within their organizations to address what’s going on. Many have enabled company e-mail or Internet access to smartphones and non-IT PCs.

IT professionals are not setting up walled gardens in the workplace to deal with the security issues posed by Gen Y, she said. Instead, they see this as a reason to make changes to policies to better accommodate the Gen Y worker’s mindset.

“You really need to make accommodation for that for the organization to remain competitive,” Mah said.

To deal with security threats posed by Gen Y, the most commonly-adopted solutions are those already in place, including client virus, spyware and malware software (84 percent), network security software (79 percent), network security hardware (74 percent), hardware or software to detect and eliminate malware on the endpoint (66 percent), and licence compliance software (68 percent). Most of those technologies are already on hand, but now is the chance for IT to refine and tune the technologies for higher security, Mah said.

Additionally, application management, streaming, virtualization and chip-based solutions to deal with security threats have already made their way into half of businesses, according to the survey.

Perhaps the biggest hole in security is in training, though. Mah said Intel has done surveys during their security Webcasts and found that only 20 percent of attendees actually train staff in areas related to security.

“It is a bit concerning. There’s a lot of work to do, clearly, on that,” Mah said.

With technology evolving and more of Gen Y continuing to enter the workforce, Mah said it was encouraging to see that IT professionals are accommodating them.

“It’s that double-edged sword that they are so comfortable with technology, comfortable with experimenting with new tools and capabilities that are out there, but obviously with anything that’s new, there is a risk of the unknown and consequences of that nature,” Mah said.

This column was written by Chris Talbot of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany

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