Genuine emails are being increasingly outnumbered in business IT networks, a new report suggests.

Only one in every 28 emails arriving at corporate inboxes was a legitimate email, according to IT security firm Sophos.

It says spam made up a greater proportion of all business email last month than at any time this year.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said: "If your company is on the internet, it's going to be hard for it to do business unless it has an effective anti-spam defence in place."

He pointed out that spam is not necessarily just a nuisance but can also be a significant threat to a business's computer network.

Last week, research from ProcessOne found the majority of UK companies have banned the use of public instant messaging (IM) on their computer networks.

However, 74 per cent of firms in the survey indicated IM could provide valuable benefits to their organisations.

New research from Connect found that, on average, it takes businesses that use backup tapes take 11.6 hours to retrieve and restore files. Connect is now recommending that SMEs switch to www.totalrecall.co.uk