Fifty-four per cent of IT managers believe that employees should be banned from watching 2010 FIFA World Cup matches at work, according to a survey.

IT professionals also believe their corporate networks could be placed under severe strain from Internet video as employees follow the 2010 FIFA World Cup games online, said a survey conducted by Blue Coat Systems, the technology leader in application delivery networking.

The survey was conducted at information security professionals Infosecurity Europe 2010 with 100 IT and networking professionals.

With one of the initial group matches for England scheduled to take place during the work day, a majority of companies may find corporate bandwidth fully occupied by streaming video, the survey said.

Watching live matches could prevent their employer’s network from performing important business functions, as 65 per cent of companies have no policies and 59 per cent have no technology in place to prioritise vital business applications.

Sixty-nine per cent of the IT managers surveyed were convinced that employees will be determined to watch matches online at work.

These sentiments were also borne out in a similar survey conducted amongst 2,000 employees by Eclipse Internet which found that 54 per cent of workers were planning to watch world cup matches whilst at work.

Another potential distraction for staff may be the temptation to communicate with friends, family and colleagues with social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook, so the survey also questioned respondents on the use of corporate policies regarding the use of social networking tools at work, the survey added.

According to the survey, while 80 per cent of companies have clear guidelines governing access to non-business websites, policies regarding the usage of social networking tools are still not in widespread use, with 64 per cent of respondents admitting to having no formal policies in place for social networking.

“Many employees are unaware of the effect of running video streaming on a network, and this is the first World Cup where so many online options exist to follow the games and also interact on social networking sites with friends and colleagues,” said Nigel Hawthorn, VP EMEA marketing at Blue Coat.

“As a streamed football match consumes around 750MB of bandwidth - the equivalent of sending more than twelve editions of Tolstoy’s War & Peace – it’s important that IT and HR managers clearly communicate their corporate rules to employees,” he concluded. – TradeArabia News Service