Four Reasons to Monitor Internet Usage
Takeaway:
Do you know what your employees are doing online, on company time? How can their online activities impact not just productivity, but also your company's bank accounts? Are you or your admins monitoring your employees' online activities to find out what they are doing that could negatively impact your company?
As an administrator or a security professional your job is greatly dependent on information. Both of these professions require that you stay on top of things and are always aware about what is going on throughout your network. There are different ways to acquire the information required to effectively do the job and to gather the type of information one is seeking.
By monitoring internet usage the following information can be ascertained:
- Internet Usage: This may be stating the obvious but information on internet usage is essential for an administrator and/or a security professional. With this information one can find out:
- How much time users spend browsing
- How much bandwidth is being consumed and for what
- Which sites people are visiting the most.
- Policies adherence: A good Internet usage monitor will give you reports on which internet usage policies users have tried to breach, how often they have attempted to breach them, and how many users have attempted to breach these policies. This information can then be used to identify the reasons for these attempted breaches. Is it because the policy is too strict and it stops people from doing their job? This analysis can help identify any changes required to make the policy less restricting without compromising the underlying security reason for it. It could also be the case that people don't understand the reasons for a particular security policy so this would be the perfect opportunity to educate your users.
- Bandwidth: When you use an internet usage monitoring solution you can get a clear picture of which websites are eating up a lot of bandwidth and those users whose activity online is consuming excessive bandwidth. If your bandwidth is being used by employees who are streaming media that has no relevance to the business, you can proactively limit bandwidth use through quotas or by blocking certain sites altogether.
- Threats: It's very important to know if and when users try to access malicious sites, because if a sudden increase is seen it can be an indication that someone is either targeting your organization or some other security mechanism has failed - for example the anti-spam solution is no longer catching phishing emails and users are clicking on links which they should not. This information can also potentially pinpoint troublesome employees. If you see a user trying to access sites that are infected with Trojans and other malware it should raise a red flag and you should investigate why that user is accessing those sites.
With a good internet usage monitoring solution you can keep an eye on what is happening within your organization enabling you to be proactive on issues that you would otherwise not be aware of.
This guest post was provided by Emmanuel Carabott on behalf of GFI Software Ltd and edited by Wiz Feinberg. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Learn more about why you need to monitor internet usage.
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