8e6 RSA 2006 Survey Results: What's really going on in the workplace

8e6 Technologies recently conducted a survey of more than 400 IT professionals to understand the value they have realized from Web filtering. The results are surprising and show that while employees may be diligently at their desks on the computer, they may not always be performing the jobs they were hired to do.

In response to our inquiry regarding the most serious infraction of Web filtering by an employee, we received many startling real-world anecdotes.

1. Employee productivity is a hot button with companies, and the Web provides many tempting distractions that can present challenges for IT staff, as reflected in the following survey outtakes:
   
   • An employee with an entrepreneurial spirit created a gambling site and acted as bookie for co-workers.
   • Downloading 300G of material from the Web, an employee used his desktop as a FTP server for other employees, finding a creative way around the Web filter.
   • It turns out day trading is a way many employees spend a significant portion of their time these days.
   • General eBay usage during the work day is another common plight companies are facing today.
     
2. Malicious use of corporate network resources puts a spotlight on how costly employee misbehavior can be for enterprises:
   
   • One employee was busted for giving away company secrets, including internal price lists and contract agreement, software code for application development and ID theft.
     
   • One employee “rented” the corporate IP address for hacker buddies to generate DOS attacks.
   • One employee was busted running an eBay businesses selling inventory stolen from the company warehouse.
3. Outrageous employee misbehavior is captured by the following survey outtakes:
   
   • One woman was caught running an online outcall service from her desk.
   
   
   • One company revealed that a Webcam was set up to monitor a cubicle and the employee accessed it from home after hours.

Below is an overview of the quantitative results from the more than 400 IT professionals surveyed.

1. 44% of respondents cited blocking access to inappropriate content as the number one need for Web filtering, followed by 32.6% who regard controlling productivity as the top requirement. Almost 25% said that bandwidth was the most critical business need.
2. More than 20 % of respondents named price as the number one consideration for purchase or renewing a filtering license, closely followed by product features (18.8%) and ease-of-use (18%).
3. Of the 36% of respondents required to provide detailed user reports to executives, more than 27% prepare reports on a weekly basis and 50% on a monthly basis.
4. Speed rules—More than 95%of respondents indicated that speed was important to their filtering—with more than 50% saying it was “very important.”