Porn Tops Web Watching, Gaming Growing Fast

Pornographic Web content accounted for a whopping one-third of all page views, according to security firm Optenet. Online gaming sites are also dramatically growing in popularity. If their popularity is growing with your employees, it's time to review your usage policies.How much of your business's time are your employees spending surfing smut or smiting fantasy foes?

Probably more than you want -- maybe a lot more, judging by figures from security company and Internet content watchdog Optenet.

According to Optenet figures, based on the company's study of over 4 million urls:

"Pornography makes up 37% of the total content on the Internet

Websites related to online role-playing games (RPGs) have grown by 212%

Websites that contain violence (+10.8%), terrorism content (+8.5%), and illegal drugs purchase (+6.8%) continue to grow"

While Optenet's warnings about these figures are primarily related -- reightly so -- to the risks such content poses for increasingly Web-savvy and connected children, there's concern for businesses here too.

Among those concerns is the amount of time your employees may be spending on non-business Web-watching.

Equally important is the amount of bandwidth video- and graphics-intensive pages impose on your networks.

But above all, the possible exposure (no pun intended) of your business to illegal and prosecutable material such as child pornography on your network and drives should prompt you to review your network usage and acceptable content policies, and to do so now.

Don't have a usage policy? Create one, make your employees aware of it and enforce it without exception. Don't Miss: The Tricky Business Of Network Use Policies