Jehovahs-Witness.com Costs UK Business Millions
The discussion forum Jehovahs-Witness.com known as "JWD" may diminish corporate productivity and network bandwidth, and be ultimately costing Businesses a conservative £5,000,000 a week due to employees watching the 24-hour hot debate, flame wars and meaningless fluff through their workplace networks.
An independent study recently discovered that more than 2 million unique visitors hit the "ex-witness" site during the last week, with huge surges in visitors occurring sporadically. It is estimated the multi-million pound figure based on the average visitor spending 15 minutes per visit.
"Employees are watching this forum at work, where they can see live discussions and use faster corporate bandwidth," said Softek's Managing Director Jason Thompson. "Unfortunately, this kind of web site is extremely network intensive. Not only does this kind of activity severely affect productivity, but it also has the potential to drastically reduce the performance of, or even crash a corporate network. Bandwidth is valuable and expensive, and participating in flame wars at a place such as JWD reduces availability for legitimate business needs such as email."
It is imperative that Web and Email Content is monitored so that corporations can manage user traffic on their networks to avoid productivity and bandwidth loss.
Thompson also commented, "With further JW 'copycat' web-sites planned it has never been more important to protect your Company from lost employee productivity and expensive wasting of Network resources. "Recent cases such as telephone giant Orange sacking dozens of staff for downloading pornography from the internet and sending it around their offices, just highlights how important it is to know what is coming in and out of your Network. Could you afford to lose 30 staff?"
"With effective tools in place and a firm, well publicised Company Internet/Email Security policy in place, you are protecting your staff from temptation as well as your Company's assets." said Thompson
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