IT Professionals More Comfortable with Social Networking at the Workplace

A new study by Facetime found that social networks were becoming more accepted at the workplace. This comes in contrast with the past several years, when social networking use was greatly discouraged and even banned at most companies. The study was conducted on more than 1100 IT professionals with the majority of them believing that social networks were important for businesses.

"The widespread acceptance of social networking as a reality for the corporate network is a relatively new phenomenon," said Nishant Jadhav, director of Product Management for FaceTime Communications. "However, managers are already recognizing the business value of social networking with 31 percent of respondents seeing significant business value and only 21 percent seeing no business value."

Social media use at the companies where those surveyed worked was on the rise, with 85 percent of them using the medium in one form or another, up from 60 percent just six months ago. Social networks were considered important for businesses by 46 percent of the respondents while 31 percent believed they were crucial for their business. The most popular platforms cited as suitable for business use were LinekdIn, Facebook and Twitter.

However, a big part of those surveyed, 43 percent, did not think that social media held any real benefits for businesses. Still, 85 percent believed that employees at their company used some form of social networking site at work, while 80 percent were worried about sensitive information leaking out through these means, and only 15 percent said social networks were blocked at their workplace.

"The reality that real-time communications and Web 2.0 applications are highly evasive is sinking in." Nishant Jadhav continued. "These applications are designed to get around Web filtering, firewalls and other traditional security measures through port crawling, tunneling and onion routing."