MORE companies in Singapore are planning to implement formal programmes to monitor their employees' behaviour on external social media by 2015.

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One reason for the expected stepped-up effort is concern over security breaches and incidents, according to a study by Gartner, a leading information- technology research and advisory company.

The study found that many organisations are already engaged in social-media monitoring as part of brand management and marketing, but less than 10 per cent of firms currently use these same techniques as part of their security- monitoring programme.

Gartner found that 60 per cent of corporations surveyed said that they expect to implement monitoring initiatives in three years' time.

"The growth in monitoring employee behaviour in digital environments is increasingly enabled by new technology and services," said Mr Andrew Walls, research vice-president of Gartner.

"Surveillance of individuals, however, can both mitigate and create risk, which must be managed carefully to comply with ethical and legal standards."

To prevent, detect and remedy security incidents, IT-security organisations have traditionally focused attention on the monitoring of internal infrastructure.

However, the impact of IT consumerisation, cloud services and social media renders this traditional approach inadequate for guiding decisions regarding the security of enterprise information and work processes.

"Security monitoring and surveillance must follow enterprise information assets and work processes into whichever technical environments are used by employees to execute work," said Mr Walls.

"Given that employees with legitimate access to enterprise information assets are involved in most security violations, security monitoring must focus on employee actions and behaviour wherever the employees pursue business-related interactions on digital systems."