Skype in the Enterprise

[Mike Gatti <ekim.ittag () gmail com>]

Hello Everyone, 

I wanted to get the groups opinions/thought on how you would or currently handle users wanting or using Skype in the 
enterprise. 
Recently what has brought this to light was the fact that our firewalls started to deny/shun users randomly from access 
to the internet. 
After a couple of dozen packet captures and cross checking software installed on the clients machines we narrowed down 
the culprit to be Skype, which later we validated in Lab.
What we saw was in random intervals all skype clients would send a burst of requests to the internet which would 
trigger the  intrusion detection threshold of our security appliances. 
Given that there were no changes to those thresholds I am left to ask what caused this behavior to start, a software 
update or an update to the skype network (if it can be called that)?
I am trying to educate myself a little more before facing the lynch mobs when I start advising on a solution. 

Thanks for taking the time, 
--
Michael Gatti  
main. 949.371.5474
(UTC -8)