Networking Sites Cost Firms Billions in Lost Hours

By Steve Pain Technology Editor

The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo is costing UK corporations close to pounds 6.5 billion annually in lost productivity, experts claim.

The warning follows new research from Global Secure Systems, one of the largest information security consultancies in the UK with more than 2,500 customers, and the organisers of Infosecurity Europe 2008, which takes place in London from April 22-24.

Office workers who responded to their survey admitted to spending at least 30 minutes a day visiting social networking sites while at work.

GSS said that represents a minimum of ten hours a month – which equates to three weeks of every year.

GSS claims the end result is potentially billions of pounds in lost productivity, plus the extra demand on bandwidth which is an additional cost to a business in terms of efficiency, maintenance and resources.

In a meeting held by Infosecurity Europe 2008 with 20 chief information security officers (CISOs) one of the biggest IT concerns for 2008 was how to manage social networking sites at work, with many estimating that between 15 per cent and 20 per cent of their current bandwidth is being taken up with social networking sites.

For many the best move forward is to ban these sites altogether.

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 reported that his company now blocks Facebook as it was consuming 30 per cent of their bandwidth.

It was also looking to block both MySpace and e-bay as they consume ten per cent and five per cent of the corporate internet browsing bandwidth.

David Hobson, managing director of GSS, said: “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.

“However, what is apparent are the serious security implications associated with social networking, where hackers, exploiters and extortionists are worming their way into these sites extracting all sorts of information on the members. Our advice as always to anyone using these sites is to give as little personal information away as possible.”

GSS claims to have saved thousands of pounds a year by practicing what it preaches – limiting access to Facebook and other social networking sites on its company network with internet filtering software.

“Our internet bandwidth requirements recently came up for review and it was suggested we would need an upgrade, costing a few thousand pounds more a year,” said Mr Hobson.

“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,” he added.

At Infosecurity Europe 2008 the subject of security and how to manage social networking vulnerabilities will be covered in a number of seminars. There will also be a keynote panel including Giles Hogben, ENISA; David Lacey, a member of the BCS Security Forum Strategic Panel and Martyn Croft, head of corporate systems, The Salvation Army.

“Organisations have a very long way to go in getting to grips with the risks presented by social networking,” said Mr Lacey.

“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.”

Martyn Croft also said: “The Salvation Army, as a Christian church and charity, has a mission to spread the Christian message and to reach out to those in need – and we’ll employ any tools we can to achieve that aim, whether we’re working in the community or even in cyberspace.

“Social networking sites can be a great tool for reaching out to people, but they can easily consume vast amount of precious resources like staff time and network bandwidth and we need to ensure that all our resources are used wisely and effectively.

“We try to achieve a balance and have to ensure essential services are not compromised either by overuse of social networking sites, or by vulnerabilities exposed.”

steve-pain@mrn.co.uk

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