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.

"Recent studies have shown that 97% of companies that have opened up their network infrastructure are seeing some misuse of the privileges around the Internet," says Jako Voges, Symantec marketing manager for the Middle East and Africa region.

"Of these, 56% say their employees admit that they violate company practice or policy and use the web for personal use during office hours. Consequently, nearly two out of three companies today feel a need to discipline some set of employees because of how they are using the web during productive business hours."

CSI/FBI reports that during 1999, 97% of companies reported insider abuse of Internet privileges.

According to Voges, the web is becoming an essential resource for many employees to obtain stock quotes, engage in live Internet chats, check the latest sports scores, or just indulge in random browsing. Porn browsing, he says, is a particularly large problem.

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," says Voges. "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 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 if the same employees had used their time for official company business.

Voges stresses 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," he says. "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 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."