Staggering When You Look At These Alarming Statistics:
Another Monday morning and you look over your office of busy employees hard at work on their computers.
What you may not realize is…
- Angela from sales is searching for another job. She surfs all of your competitor’s sites and uploads her resume to their HR department…
- John in production is reviewing this weekend’s game highlights play-byplay on his favorite sports site…
- Jeff in customer support is making the entire network run slow by downloading huge MP3 files of Mega Death live in concert…
- Mary, your secretary is accessing her personal Gmail account via your network and accidentally downloading a virus…
- Dave from shipping is on hotdate.com looking at questionable photos…
If you have employees with unmonitored access to e-mail and the Internet, there are a number of activities they can participate in that can harm your business:
- Bandwidth Costs: Heavy graphics, video clips, and audio files are particularly notorious for clogging digital pipelines. If your staff is emailing photos of their family vacation to their friends, paying bills online, or downloading music, they are using up a huge amount of expensive bandwidth and slowing down your organization as a result.
- Legal Liability: 70% of all Internet porn traffic occurs during the 9-to-5 workday (SexTracker) and 27% of Fortune 500 companies have been accused of sexual harassment stemming from inappropriate e-mail and Internet usage. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that companies can be held accountable for their employees forwarding offensive messages and viewing pornography.
- A Damaged Reputation: A lawyer at a London firm forwarded an explicit email he received from a female acquaintance to several co-workers as a joke. Unfortunately, they sent it on to a few of their friends and within a short period of time, thousands of people from around the world, including the press, received it. Because of this e-mail, they ended up in a huge controversy that hurt their image and credibility.
- Loss of Productivity: E-mail and the Internet offer a temptation that is hard to resist; that’s why 73% of employees who use the Internet are fully aware that they are consuming valuable bandwidth and hampering critical business activities with inappropriate Internet usage – but do it anyway.
- Viruses and Spyware: Employees can accidentally (or intentionally!) download harmful viruses and spyware through music files, screen savers, and other online files.
So what can you do to protect your organization?
