As more applications turn to SSL to help keep users secure, they may also be inadvertently hampering the ability of enterprises to ensure malicious code and exploits are not slithering through network traffic from the endpoint.

According to The Application Usage and Risk Report conducted by Palo Alto Networks, applications using SSL represent 25 percent of the applications examined and 23 percent of the overall bandwidth used by applications in its study. To compile the report, the security vendor analyzed the traffic of 1,253 organizations and a viewed more than 28 exabytes of data between October 2010 and April 2011.

The report predicts that applications that use SSL will continue to grow in size, as more applications follow the relatively recent lead of Twitter, Facebook and Gmail, which have all recently set SSL either as a standard setting or as a user-selectable option.

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