the good and bad side of information technology

With the advances in the development of society, information technology is becoming a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives and is becoming modernized. However, applying IT in the workplace both has its advantages and disadvantages. The development of technological devices and applications indeed offer organizations some advantages when they apply IT in the workplace. It can be said that IT has some noteworthy positive effects. It is arguably true that the top advantage of IT in the workplace is its speeding up effects and virtually everyone would agree to that. Simply, it makes work faster. An employee’s ton of work can be done seamlessly if the right computer along with suitable working software is perfectly combined. Also, with the help of the computer which is an obvious information technological tool, large amounts of data can be compressed into small chips and databases without having to move cabinets. It is even now easier to search a file of many years old with the computer as long as you have the right folder directory of the search word. Furthermore, beyond the scopes of software or computers, production and manufacturing processes through machines have now undergone a big transformational change in the rate at which products are developed and built within a short period. For example, imagine what your business would be like if there were no computers. Bookkeeping would have to be done on paper and each calculation would have to be done manually with a calculator, financial transactions would require regular trips to the bank. Communicating with clients could only be done over the phone, or in face-to-face meetings, and correspondence would have to be done by mail, all with the associated long- distance fees, travel expenses, wait times and delays. Despite these aforementioned benefits, several drawback do exist. The main disadvantages of IT is poor confidentiality within business. The use of technology through various communication platforms allows employees to misuse company information hence increasing vulnerability of a company secret-information. In fact, releasing sensitive and confidential information about a business can greatly jeopardize the company’s plans. However, no security technology can stop an employee who has authorized access to a computer system from, for example, obtaining confidential company information and selling it to competitors. A number of studies have found that attacks stemming from internal sources are greater in scope and severity and can result in about 10 times as many compromised records as those from external sources. Even more disturbingly, a sizable percentage of such attacks turn out to be deliberate.