Burstek Internet, a Florida-based consulting company, has released an intriguing study of American workers revealing that a significant amount of productivity is lost during work time because employees spend too much time playing around on the Internet.

For the study, the company examined 10,688 employees in 2005 and reviewed Internet activity pertaining to three major enterprise security threat groups: legal liability, lost productivity and security risk.

"The Internet has a revolutionary impact on global business, and it is hard to imagine a firm that has not been affected," said David Smith, COO of Burstek. "Unfortunately, along with the benefits come many side effects that have the potential to dramatically erode productivity and pose many other dangers to the enterprise and to employees, themselves. That is why it is so vital to carefully monitor employee Internet use. This study confirms that uncontrolled employee Internet use is a very serious threat to compliance, security and productivity."

The study reported the following findings:

• 19.42 percent of all personal use represented Web sites that posed a security threat to the network, including file sharing, malicious code and spyware;
• 72.34 percent of all personal use represented employee visits to significant productivity-draining Web sites such as chat rooms, entertainment, game playing, job searching personal e-mail, shopping, and sports;
• 78.1 percent of all users accessed the Internet while at work for entertainment and personal use (which resulted in over twenty percent of all pages viewed, viewing time and bandwidth costs); and
• 8.23 percent of all personal use represented visits to Web sites that posed legal liability risks, such as gambling sites, hacking, hate speech and pornography sites.
• Of all the organizations studies, government agencies had the highest incidences of employees visiting sites that contained spyware or malicious code.

Burstek’s 2005 Internet Usage Study is quite thorough, providing additional statistics and analysis of Internet use by industry, as well as a break down of the individual risk categories. The study also identifies the top sites visited for categories such as Web-mail, sports, shopping, online chat and more.

Posted on: March 27, 2006

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