Companies can see the benefits surrounding the use of Instant Messaging (IM), but the vast majority still ban its use within their organization, so says a new survey.

Research released by instant messaging firm ProcessOne shows that 72 percent of U.K. businesses have banned the use of public instant messaging (IM) software, such as MSN, AIM and Yahoo!, because of security worries.

Yet the Vanson Bourne survey of 100 senior IT decision-makers from enterprises of 1,000 or more employees, also discovered that 74 percent of respondents think IM could provide valuable collaboration benefits to their organization.

IDC recently announced that IM was set to overtake email as the preferred form of business communication by the second half of 2010.

Yet despite IM being viewed as an effective tool for non-intrusive, real-time communication regardless of location or surrounding, it seems that at the moment, security concerns are at the foremost of organizations minds.

Concern centers on allowing the use of public IM applications within an organization. 88 percent of IT directors said they were worried by this. In fact, over half (56 percent) said that their organization was worried about losing sensitive business information through IM conversations. Despite this, only 12 percent of those surveyed said they keep an audit trail of IM messages sent by employees using free public IM software.

"Businesses have a fear of IM because they see that normal IM applications are not designed to be used in a corporate world," said Mickaël Rémond, CEO of ProcessOn. He feels that many organizations are torn between wanting to maximize security or gain collaboration and productivity benefits, and he thinks that maintaining security is winning at this point.

"With public IM systems like MSN, you are accepting that you don't control who you are talking to," said Rémond. "When you control an corporate IM package however, you can define what is acceptable and what is not acceptable for your organization."

"People also only want to receive messages from people they know," he added. "You cannot build that on public IM applications as that is in the wild."

When questioned further about their organization's reaction to the need to keep audit trails of IM conversations in order to comply with regulations, over one third (38 percent) of IT directors said that their business had banned the use of public IM outright. 21 percent said that their company is using a private IM system, instead of public IM, so that audit trails can be kept.