A significant number of IT managers are looking to restrict employee access to social networks such as MySpace and Facebook in a bid to reduce lost productivity.

Research carried out by Global Secure Systems (GSS) revealed that workers admitted to spending 30 minutes a day visiting such websites - which totals at least ten hours a month,

According to the report, such use of social networks could be costing UK companies a combined GBP 6.5 billion in lost productivity each year.

At Infosecurity Europe 2008, one of the main concerns for IT in 2008 among technology bosses was how to manage the fact that social networking sites were using between an estimated 15 and 20 per cent of bandwidth.

Managing director of GSS David Hobson said that for some companies, social networks can have business benefits and so could potentially be managed with a reasonable use policy.

"However, what is apparent are the serious security implications associated with social networking, where hackers, exploiters and extortionists are worming their way into these sites extracting all sorts of information on the members - our advice as always to anyone using these sites is to give as little personal information away as possible," he added.

A recent study from Badenoch & Clark found that just six per cent of people feel that social networks are a significant obstruction to productivity at work, VnuNet reports.

According to a recent survey by Connect, the two biggest IT headaches for businesses were 'everyday hassles with IT' (37 per cent) and 'security concerns' (32 per cent) In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'