Employers of more than one-third of those surveyed (38.6 percent) had suffered a major IT disruption caused by staff visiting questionable and other non-work related web sites with work-issued hardware, resulting in malware infection and other related issues, according to a study conducted by GFI Software. The study examined various ways that workers use company-provided computers and laptops for personal activities, and the direct impact that personal use can have on the organization.
The study also revealed that more than 35 percent (35.8) of staff would not hesitate to take company property including email archives, confidential documents and other valuable intellectual property from their work-owned computer before returning it, if they were to leave their company.
Furthermore, the study revealed that nearly half of those surveyed (48 percent) use a personal cloud-based file storage solution (e.g. Dropbox, OneDrive, Box) for storing and sharing company data and documents.
Key findings from the survey include:
■ 66.9 percent of respondents use their work-provided computer for non-work activities
■ Overall, 90.9 percent have at least some understanding of their company’s policy on usage, and 94.1 percent follow it to at least some degree
■ More than a quarter (25.6 percent) of those surveyed have had to get their IT department to fix their computer after an issue occurred as a result of innocent non-work use, while almost 6 percent (5.8) had to do the same due to questionable use (adult sites, torrents, etc.)
■ 10 percent have lost data and/or intellectual property as a result of the disruption caused by the outage
This study underscores the fact that data protection is a big problem, and one that has been exacerbated by the casual use of cloud file sharing services that can’t be centrally managed by IT. Content controls are critical in ensuring data does not leak outside the organization and doesn’t expose the business to legal and regulatory compliance penalties. Furthermore, it is important that policies and training lay down clear rules on use and reinforce the ownership of data.
The blind, independent study was conducted for GFI Software by Opinion Matters and surveyed 1,010 U.S. employees from companies with up to 1,000 staff that had a company-provided desktop or laptop computer.
Sergio Galindo is GM Infrastructure Business Unit at GFI Software.
