Americans Goofing Off At Work

Published: Tuesday, March 21, 2006 Online-Casinos.com

AMERICANS GOOFING OFF AT WORK

New study shows that it's a great American passtime!



Florida-based Burstek Internet consultants has presented an eye-opening study of Americans at work, showing that productivity losses are commonplace due to goofing off on the Internet.

The company's 2005 Internet Usage Study examines results from the Internet activity reported for 10,688 employees in 2005, and highlights activity related to the three major enterprise security threat groups: legal liability, security risk and lost productivity.

"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."

Highlights from the study include:

78.1 percent of all users accessed the Internet while at work for personal use and entertainment (resulting in over 20 percent of all pages viewed, viewing time and bandwidth costs);

72.34 percent of all personal use represented employee productivity-draining visits to Web sites, including those for shopping, entertainment, personal e-mail, sports, chat rooms, job searches and game playing;

19.42 percent of all personal use represented Web sites that posed a security threat to the network, including spyware, file sharing and malicious code; and

8.23 percent of all personal use represented Web sites that posed legal liability risks, including pornography, hacking, gambling and hate speech.

Government agencies had the highest incidence of employees accessing sites containing spyware and malicious code (nearly 23 percent);

The complete 2005 Internet Usage Study provides additional statistics and analysis of internet use by industry, as well as breaking out the individual risk categories. It identifies the top sites visited for categories such as online chat, shopping, sports, Web-mail and more. The full report with results and analysis of the study is available online at Burstek.com.