Monitoring and blocking inappropriate Internet access is on the mind of business owners and managers. Some suspect that the lack of monitoring and blocking could be hurting productivity or worse it could be opening them to a lawsuit. The damage to your business could be worse than you thought. A recent survey of 3500 UK companies found that employees spend 233 million hours a month on just Facebook. Just one of millions of sites where employees can spend time. The loss was estimated be a staggering $260 million a day in lost productivity.
The U.S. Treasury Department found that Internet activities such as personal email, chat rooms, shopping, and personal finances and stocks accounted for 51% of employee’s time online. This overuse of the Internet for purposes other than work has become known as ‘cyberslacking’.
The loss in productivity is just the beginning. Open Internet activity can also open employers to lawsuits from employees being exposed to racist or pornographic material being downloaded. It is essential for companies to protect themselves and their employees and be aware of what employees are downloading. Most importantly, for the protection of the company and its employees.
Another problem with remote workers using corporate wireless accounts is the ability to use up available pools of cellular data access. Overages can cost companies a considerable amount of money.
Fortunately there a lot of options for Internet access monitoring and management. Many of todays Unified Thread Management appliances also known client firewall appliances include filtering or it can be added with the purchase of an additional software license. Advanced units allow a manger to split users into groups so that access can be adjusted based on employees job roles. Some even allow synchronization with corporate Active Directory services so that management can be done from the same interface where employee network access is setup.
It is important to remember that these appliances will only protect your physical network on your business premises. They will not limit employees once they leave the corporate network. As more and more employees work remotely this can become a problem. Fortunately there are solutions including cloud-based monitoring and filtering systems that are very cost-effective. Again these systems also allow policies that are applied to specific groups of employees during certain hours.