I was looking through my Technorati stats and found that a blog from McAfee commented on and linked to my article on a cost analysis of Skype.

My beef with their post is that there is absolutely no substance to it. Their counter argument is to just regurgitate Mike Rothman’s argument that analysis like this one are too simple and tend to be ‘cooked.’ Show me a risk analysis that isn’t cooked and I’ll show you an ineffective one.

Both Rothman and McAfee, actually since McAfee just parroted Rothman, Rothman argues that a cost analysis shouldn’t leave out the many collaborative features of Skype. To that I say that if you are an enterprise-class shop looking to leverage Skype as a collaborative tool, you should start looking for another job. Skype is great for SOHO environments at best. It doesn’t scale, it isn’t network admin friendly (yet) and with functions such as the supernode, can actually be a burden to the network.

Below is my comment to the McAfee blog, just in case it doesn’t get posted there:

Risk analysis is fluid, subjective process meant to serve the needs of one particular organization and therefore there is no cookie-cutter analysis that Company X can photocopy and provide to their executives. The article was offered as one particular analysis done, among many, to help demonstrate its potential impact on the IT and financial environment.

Having said that, the article opened by stating that the historical justification for Skype has been cost savings on long distance telephone charges. Therefore it was from that angle I did that particular analysis.

All of the other *fluff* that Skype offers is already deployed in our environment in a far more robust and secure manner than Skype can possibly offer and I would imagine that most corporate enterprises are similar to ours. In 2007 if you are an enterprise-class company looking at Skype as your central collaborative tool, you should fire the person who suggested it, not from a security stand point but from a technology standpoint.

What features does Skype offer that seasoned players like Polycom or Microsoft Office Live don’t already offer? Not to mention the fact that Skype isn’t enterprise-friendly to begin with. It was only Skype’s recent version 3.0 that offers GPO management, which is still lacking and deficient anyway.

For a more in-depth look at many of Skype’s risks, see my article from July ‘06.

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