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Sales staff: Worst IT offenders
…while remote workers are malware culprits

By Nick Heath

Published: Friday 11 April 2008

Sales staff and home workers should be kept on a tight leash by IT managers to avoid damaging corporate systems.

While sales staff bleed corporate bandwidth dry with non-work related activity, the carelessness of home and branch workers is introducing malware onto the business networks, a survey of 250 UK IT managers found.

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Sales staff were the worst bandwidth wasters according to 43 per cent of network managers and 34 per cent of security managers - with remote workers and senior management the least likely to waste resources.

Remote workers fared less well on security, with half of network managers and security managers saying this group was the most likely to introduce malware to systems.

Workers outside the office are also the most likely to suffer from poor internet and application performance, the survey by research house e-Media found.

Nigel Hawthorn, VP EMEA marketing at Blue Coat which commissioned the research, said that performance in remote and branch offices can suffer unless both of these issues were tackled.