The Hindu Business Line : Concern over poor awareness of Internet usage policy

Coimbatore, Jan. 20 While the life in an organisation has become dependent on IT, the awareness about the Internet usage policy is poor and not well communicated; and the IT spend and security budgets still low, Mr Surinder Singh, Director (SAARC), Websense, said.

“IT managers have expressed concern and reservation about the way the Web was being used at work place,” he said, sharing the findings of a study by AC Neilsen on ‘Web Security Survey India 2007’.

Over 450 different companies across verticals such as BFSI, IT/ITES, manufacturing, pharma and others participated in the survey.

Security threat

A majority of the IT managers seemed to express concern over employees’ sending work documents to personal e-mail accounts to work from home, sending an e-mail to a wrong e-mail address, clicking on a link in e-mails received from an unknown source and using their work computer for personal activities such as online banking, email, shopping etc, among others.

The findings revealed that nearly 42 per cent of the employees located in Bangalore sent work documents to personal email accounts to work from home. This is higher than the overall sample average of 35 per cent, and much higher when compared to Chennai and Hyderabad at 26 and 27 per cent respectively.

“It is not as if they have not been sensitized. It is a security violation, but many contend that the commuting time is too long to be lost idling.”

Over 63 per cent of IT managers believed that laptop or remote users pose security threats to their organisation.

The proportion of laptop users in an organisation though is not really high.

The findings also revealed that the average hours spent (working from home) on work related Web sites (using a laptop) was relatively higher than non-work related sites.

Emphasising the need for a security culture, Mr Singh said: “The security industry in India is growing much faster than the IT spend/budget.”