The 6.5 billion quid hello
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Blog, Facebook, Security, Internet on
According to a poll conducted by Global Secure Systems and Infosecurity Europe 2008, the cost to UK corporations in terms of lost productivity as a result of staff being all sociable online is as high as £6.5 billion every year!
The poll asked questions of 776 office workers who admitted that they spent at least 30 minutes every day at social networking sites during working hours. Or put another way, 10 hours a month or an absolute minimum of 3 working weeks each year. The worse offenders, or the friendliest workers depending upon your viewpoint, clocked up 3 hours every day at social networking sites. Boy, I would say that whatever business they were working at needs to either get some new management in, or better still get some new work in so these guys have something better to do all day than poke people they have never met or exchange virtual gifts with a plumber from Deptford just because he calls himself Victoria and has an avatar that looks fit.
According to the press release that landed in my laptop this morning, a recent meeting held by Infosecurity Europe 2008 with 20 CISOs revealed that one of their biggest IT concerns for 2008 was how to manage social networking sites at work. Many apparently estimated that between 15% and 20% of their current bandwidth is being taken up with social networking sites and for many the best move forward is to ban these sites altogether.
Why not? I am a great fan of social networking, believe it or not, having been involved with virtual communities a whole decade or more before social networking was even thought of as a term. However, the workplace is the workplace and the same old acceptable use policy issues must apply when it comes to social networking as they do to viewing porn or downloading MP3s. Claire Sellick – Infosecurity Europe Event Director said “It would appear that most CISO and IT Directors loathe social networking sites and if they had their way would ban them completely, but what is also coming across loud and clear is that the HR departments actually welcome the use of these sites – so there is a lot of internal pushing and shoving going on between HR and IT over how best to manage these sites.”
One FTSE100 CISO claims they now block Facebook as it was consuming 30% of their bandwidth and they are looking to block both MySpace and e-bay as they consume 10% and 5% of the corporate Internet browsing bandwidth. According to David Hobson, the MD of GSS “Social networking sites are now integral to the way that many of the latest and youngest recruits into the workforce communicate and work, so for some sectors social networking sites may have a part to play in terms of competitive advantage or used for research or as a marketing tool. It comes down to a fine balancing act – and mostly a case of introducing a “reasonable use” policy.”
And enforcing it, of course. Which is where the problems often start. Unfortunately, unless they are enforced you end up in the position of being exposed to serious security implications as has been exampled by the introduction of worms and Trojan droppers to users of social networking sites in the last few months. A trend which is only likely to continue on an upward curve.
David Lacey, Member of the BCS Security Forum Strategic Panel would appear to agree “Organisations have a very long way to go in getting to grips with the risks presented by social networking. Lost productivity is the tip of the iceberg. The threat of social engineering to hijack sensitive information is real and growing. And current acceptable use policies are far from acceptable: they are poorly written, maintained, communicated and enforced. There are also some big, political issues that have to be addressed such as how far to police or trust staff, and how to maintain thought leadership across highly networked groups of staff.”
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