|
Bosses plan to curtail social networking use SOCIAL
networking sites are costing Irish and British businesses over £7billion
a year in lost productivity.
Workers are logging onto sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace for
at least 30 minutes a day, which adds up to a minimum of 10 hours a month
or three weeks a year, according to figures released by IT security group
Global Secure Systems (GSS).
The use of these sites is becoming a major concern for employers who believe
the cost to businesses will dramatically increase over the coming year,
according to ISME, the representative body for small and medium enterprises
in Ireland.
Head of research at ISME, Jim Curran said that over the last 12 months
there had been a huge increase in the number of employees using these sites
while at work.
He said: “There are concerns among employers that these sites could
damage a company as employees could put confidential information on the
sites which could lead to embarrassment and a loss of confidential information.
“Some employees may only be spending half an hour on the sites during
the day but often they are left open which can lead to a reduction in attention
span.
“Employees also need to be careful as potential employers can use
the sites to get an indication of their character. Jobseekers can
leave themselves very exposed.”
GSS, which has offices in Dublin and London, said it saved thousands of pounds
a year by limiting access to Facebook and other social networking sites.
GSS managing director, David Hobson said: “Our internet bandwidth
requirements recently came up for review and it was suggested we would
need an upgrade, costing a few thousand more a year.
“After analysing the traffic patterns, however, we realised that
around 25 per cent of our web usage was for social networking sites such
as Facebook.
“After locking down this traffic and just allowing staff to view
these sites during their lunch hour or after work, we found we didn’t
actually need to upgrade our bandwidth after all and have saved a considerable
amount in the upgrade costs.” GSS’s report said that one chief
information officer at a FTSE 100 company reported that they now block
Facebook because it was consuming 30 per cent of their internet bandwidth.
The IT executive, who declined to be named, said his company was now looking
to block both MySpace and eBay, which take up 10 per cent and 5 per cent
of the corporate internet browsing bandwidth.
Over the next six months, 63 per cent of businesses in Britain are planning
to monitor or limit staff access to these sites and 17 per cent plan to
ban access at work completely, according to Computerweekly.com. |
