Productivity drops as Internet usage increases. While employees who make personal telephone calls on company lines are costing their employers money, this loss is miniscule when compared to the impact Internet misuse is having on an organisation`s performance.
Organisations are increasingly losing productivity as staff download images from either their e-mails or the Internet and forward these to their friends and colleagues.
It is labour intensive for an IT administrator to stop all image files at the gateway and then manually go through them to check which are pornographic, or not, before sending them on. The need for business to keep e-mail flowing quickly and efficiently is high in demand. Unacceptable images are often over-sized and can cause network congestion, slowing the pace of business.
IDC has predicted that e-mail traffic will grow from 2.1 billion messages in 1998 to 7.8 billion in 2002. Against this background research shows that 79% of employers detected abuse of the Internet and e-mail, including engaging in live Internet chats, checking the latest sports scores, indulging in random browsing, or downloading and transmission of pornography, within their organisations (CSI 2000 Computer Crime and Security Survey). Organisations now regard the distribution of pornography in and out of their networks as key content security threat.
Research done by Forrester has revealed that there are over 60 000 x-rated sites on the web. If you consider a recent article in USA Today, which says that a staggering 50% of registered hits on these sites occur during business hours, the drop in productivity rates is enormous. The impact this loss of productivity can have on a company`s bottom line is substantial."
For example, in just one month IBM, AT&T and Apple calculated a loss of $42 000 in wages in revenue owing to their employees surfing the Penthouse web site during business hours. The same exercise showed a further loss of $316 862 in lost opportunity which could have been realised did the same employees use there time for official company business.
It is essential to stress the need for a new wave of network security that provides comprehensive protection from these new vulnerabilities companies are facing.
Policies that are understood and accepted by all employees must be put in place, additionally, organisations must implement measures that help cut unproductive employee surfing. This could be done through the use of Internet management tools (URL filtering) and email screening (or e-mail filtering) applications that help enforce IAPs by limiting access to sites deemed undesirable or by scanning incoming and outgoing email content. Cost savings for companies using such applications can be dramatic.
For more information on Content Security and Policies, please contact NetCom Solutions SA.
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