Internet Usage Monitoring
INTERNET ACCESS CONTROL IN THE WORKPLACE: A MUST HAVE
Introduction
There are several reasons why you need to monitor employee use of internet access.
These include:
Protection from legal threats:
The legal principle of vicarious liability means that a superior is answerable for
the actions undertaken by his subordinate in the course of official assignment or
while using official equipment.
Most importantly, the Advanced Fee Fraud and Other Related Offences Act 2006 signed
into law June 5, 2006 prescribes that users of internet services must henceforth
be monitored and details of their transactions must be archived for up to one year
and that providers of internet access must guard against the use of their network
for criminal activities.
While the yet to be passed Computer Security and Critical Information Infrastructure
Protection Bill also has a records-retention provision. It proposes that all traffic,
subscriber information or specific content must be retained for a period of time
as the President may, by Order published in the Federal Gazzette may specify from
time to time
More effective work environment
To monitor and if need be block the uploading of sensitive documents
Better network performance
Restricting the download of files not needed at work, such as multimedia files (MP3,
AVI) which can slow down internet access
Total overview of user activity
Generate detailed reports about user activity including information
about visited sites and the size of transferred data, etc.
How GFI WebMonitor fits the bill
With GFI WebMonitor, it is possible to:
- Exercise finely-grained control over employee use of internet access by permitting
the enforcement of internet access policies organization-wise, department-wise,
or on an individual basis
- block access to undesirable websites
- check and block
bandwidth jamming traffic and thus improve internet performance
- gain mastery over
spyware, adware and other malware that often find their way into users PCs uninvited
-
get a bird’s eye view of organizational internet use through: (i) URL history view:
which groups all accesses to a particular website and lists them according to popularity,
displaying the number of hits, data transferred in and out, file types accessed
and the users who accessed certain sites
(ii) Users’ history view: lists all network
users and all the websites they accessed, together with the number of hits, data
transferred in/out and the daily times distribution of their web browsing. (iii) Web
access in progress view: show all ongoing web accesses in detail, enables blocking
of unwanted/bandwidth jamming traffic (iv) Last web access view:
shows last completed
200 URLs requests in detail (v) Live Daily report
per user, per IP and per website
