Social networking sites cost business £6.5bn in lost productivity

The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo is costing UK corporations close to £6.5 billion annually in lost productivity, according to a survey conducted by information security consultancy Global Secure Systems (GSS) and Infosecurity Europe 2008.

The poll was carried out amongst 776 office workers, who admitted to spending at least 30 minutes a day visiting social networking sites whilst at work, that’s a minimum of 10 hours a month which equates to three weeks of every year with two respondents who were so hooked that the spend three hours visiting these sites every day. 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 recent meeting held by Infosecurity Europe 2008 with 20 chief information security officers (CISOs) one of their biggest IT concerns for 2008 was how to manage social networking sites at work, with many estimating that between 15% and 20% of their current bandwidth is being taken up with social networking sites and for many want 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 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 recent research by Computerweekly.com 63% of businesses are planning to monitor or limit staff access to these sites and 17% plan to ban access at work completely over the next six months.

David Hobson, MD 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 and 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 they preach by 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 David Hobson, managing director of GSS.

"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”