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Personal Use of PCs at Work Can't Be Stopped, Study Finds

by Tim Stevens on April 28, 2009 at 01:49 PM

Personal Internet Use at Work Deemed Inevitable, Potentially Harmful
If you've managed to convince your boss that personal Internet use at the office is a good thing, kudos to you. If, however, he or she isn't buying it, then maybe you should go for the 'inevitability' argument, citing a report that has found attempts at blocking workers' personal use of the 'Net to be more or less futile.

As reported by Ars Technica, Palo Alto Networks' 'Application Usage and Risk Report for the Spring of 2009' states that employees "will take whatever steps are necessary to use whichever applications they want." So banning those installed Twitter clients won't do a thing, employers. That seems innocuous enough, but some of the report's conclusions are a bit more troubling. For instance, 92-percent of the 900,000 surveyed employees were found to use peer-to-peer, file-sharing applications that hog office bandwidth and, potentially, spread illegal content. Let's do keep in mind, though, that this report comes from a firewall company, which could certainly benefit from employers' paranoia over their employees' Web use.



For the employees out there, we can understand the temptation to install everything under the sun, but it might be wise to use a little common sense. As for the bosses, maybe sitting down with your workers and having a chat about the effects of these apps would be a little more effective than a sternly worded e-mail banning any personal Internet usage at all. We all know how effective that ages-old tactic has been with phone calls. [From: Palo Alto Networks and Ars Technica, Via: Geek Sugar]

Tags: firewall, internet, office, p2p, top, work, workplace

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