The Verse - Volume 23
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Tech Tips – Web Filtering

With the entire world available at their fingertips through the Internet, employees today are often distracted by non-work related or unproductive activities. Web filtering software can help organizations define and enforce rules for using the Internet at work.

A recent study by Internet filtering and reporting company, 8e6 Technologies, tells of an employee who was not only running his own business on company time, but selling items stolen from the corporate warehouse as well.

Web filtering software can also reduce an organization’s legal liability by preventing employees from engaging in many types of illegal or inappropriate online behavior. An example from the 8e6 study: an infrastructure manager busted a woman running an outcall service from within the company.

Organizations can experience decreased network capacity or system downtime when too many employees use bandwidth-hogging applications, like streaming media or Internet radio. A CTO reported to the 8e6 study that he had to bring his company back online after the Victoria's Secret Webcast overloaded the network. Web filtering software helps guard against these unauthorized system overloads.

Of the responses from more than 400 participants in the 8e6 study, eBay businesses were among those most cited by the study, along with Internet gambling and pornography.

"URL filtering is but one of a few perimeter-based security technologies for protecting against malicious Internet content," said Lawrence Orans, research director at Gartner. "Organizations increasingly use URL filtering as a first line of defense, by blocking access to Web sites that spread spyware."

With fast Internet connections and powerful Web tools readily available, it's not difficult for someone to launch side businesses powered by the company network.” The good news for companies is that filtering technologies have evolved and now it’s possible to zero in on inappropriate Web use by employees.