Many businesses are intimidated by the security issues surrounding the use of instant messaging (IM) within an office network, a technology specialist has revealed.

ProcessOne stated that chatting within the office could be a useful tool to have, especially as it can provide status updates for other users which can note that the respondent is in a meeting, on the phone or out of the office.

However, chief executive officer at ProcessOne Mickael Remond said that security surrounding the technology left many companies feeling apprehensive about embracing it.

Mr Remond said: "Businesses can be afraid of the security implications [and] we actually did some research on this which showed exactly that.

"A lot of companies are concerned about the use of IM in a way, particularly the public ones like MSN and Yahoo."

In the 2008 Enterprise IT Decision Makers Survey from Vanson Bourne, 90 per cent of financial services were concerned with security risks from public instant messaging within their firms.

A recent Connect survey found that the two major concerns about outsourcing services like IT support were 'loss of control' (56 per cent) and 'budget over-runs' (43 per cent)