Six Ways Employees Abuse the Internet at Work

Okay, it’s another hopefully productive day at the office and you’re wondering, again, why is your network so slow? Peering across the room, your employees are seemingly productive, working on the applications and information systems that typify their own business day. But something isn’t quite right. Internet response feels… sluggish, and it takes a long time to retrieve files from the network server. Just what is going on here?

Well, here’s my short-list on common workplace abuses committed by employees that can slow down the performance of your network, your server, and PC’s. These activities can sometimes go unnoticed, and these applications can sit on their workstations and operate in the background, allowing the user to switch or toggle between these and what they’re supposed to be working on; in some cases, no toggle is necessary: these applications are just working in the background, sapping the life-energy away from the company’s network.

1. Torrents, FTP Clients, and P2P File Sharing.

Torrents are files that can be downloaded to what is called a torrent client (BitTorrent is a popular application) and the user can download pirated software, videos, games, and even TV shows to their computer. Torrents are widely available and easily distributed (the Priate Bay, for example, was recently embroiled in controversay). FTP (File Transfer Protocol) clients are software like FileZilla that allows users to download files across the Internet faster, and P2P (Peer-to-Peer) file sharing applications are tools that allow users to distribute as well as receive pirated content. All of these applications can work in the background of the computer and suck bandwidth out of the network while your employee downloads the latest “American Idol”, “Mad Men”, or ripped “Transformers 2″ so they can watch it on their iPods, iPhones, or on their home PC’s. What’s worse is that they can then share what they’ve downloaded with others on the Internet, whereas they, too, can suck bandwidth away from your network to distribute the pirated material.

2. Instant Messaging.

According to HRtools.com, 20-percent of US workers use IM at least once per week at work. The problem with IM is volume and risk. Instant Messaging is a huge time sap for undisciplined employees but it’s also a means of transferring files behind your firewall without restriction. Users connected on IM can move any form of content through the IM interface, including dragging and dropping videos, music, or documents to their friends… again, wasting time and bandwidth. Because IM bypasses all of the traditional filters we use to protect a network, IM is a security risk and a hole in the network’s natural defenses.

3. Music and Video.

Hard numbers on YouTube or Hulu-watchers at work are difficult to come by, but intuitively, we can say that the ease of watching such content online makes it all the more likely they’re being watched from work. Maybe watching one YouTube video or downloading one music file from iTunes seems harmless, but most employees who do this will rarely stop at one. They’re constantly downloading music and watching video, and if you multiply this behavior across an entire workplace, your business network has now become dedicated to delivering pop culture. And just like the previous risks that were mentioned, this content can be stored on your network servers or on the PC’s on your employees, extending your own criminal and civil liability for storing pirated content.

4. Personal Browsing/Shopping.

According to HRtools.com, 29-percent of US workers will shop online at work; 43-percent spend more than one hour shopping at work. 61% of workers will use the Internet for personal research and browsing, and 37% of those workers indicated that they’d spend more than 30 minutes doing it.

5. Blogging and Social Media.

According to HRtools.com, 9-percent of employees have a blog and nearly a quarter of them will blog while they’re at work. Meanwhile, 41-percent of workers surveyed by HRtools.com revealed that they had a Facebook, Myspace, or other social networking page, and more than 30-percent spent time on their page during the workday.

6. Gaming.

Finally, multiplayer games, online gambling, networked video games, or even lightweight arcade-style games introduced by IM software permiates the workplace.

Well, what’s the solution then? What steps can you take to prevent these kinds of distractions from being introduced into your office-place?

1. Set Policy.

You need to set acceptable use expectation. What makes these situations worse is a grandiose sense of entitlement that younger workers have towards using Internet resources. A recent study by Deloitt demonstrated that 63-percent of 18-34 year olds surveyed believe that employers have no business monitoring their online activities, particularly when it comes to social networking. Clearly this is problematic and it’s only going to get worse. If we’re to look at all of these potential abuses in aggregate, we see an extraordinary amount of time and resources that can be sucked away from employers. Setting expectations and controlling perception in the first step you can take to curb this behavior.

2. Set Technical Controls.

After expectations have been set and management has communicated their intent, then it’s important to follow that up with Technical Controls that restrict Internet usage to the level desired by management. Technology professionals can assist in putting safeguards and restrictions over Internet activity to detect, prevent, or outright prohibit the use of these applications or content.

3. Audit.

At the end of the day, we can’t take our safeguards for granted – we must investigate the network and the PC environment to guarantee management’s expectations are being enforced. In the least, following-up on monitored activity to track-down and weed-out the problem performers; armed with useful information, management can take corrective action with their employee and perhaps re-align their activities to management’s expectations.

You know, it’s not like every employee is bad, that they’re wasting huge amounts of time, or even their intentions to expose the company’s network to greater risk is deliberate – they may very well not understand the implications of what they’re doing. However, if left unmonitored or your expectations uncommunicated, these kinds of activities can reduce network performance, exacerbate an unhealthy sense of entitlement, and even expose the company’s assets to malware, further diminishing productivity and raising costs. Since a large part of managing your business is managing employee expectations, taking a few proactive steps like this allows you to manage your technology and your people by setting reasonable standards, and that’s good technology management.

R

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