Blog / Website Monitoring and Traffic Filtering for Businesses
When the internet was first invented we thought it was going to be a boon for humanity. Unfortunately, although it was easy to see the internet’s potential for good, it was just as easy for the criminals to see its potential for exploitation. From a business perspective, this meant things like leaking inside information, wasting employees’ time and reducing their productivity. Since then, website monitoring has been fairly common practice for corporations to track activity in their network (and that’s without even bringing up the more modern threat of malware).
Internet traffic filtering and website monitoring has been happening for decades. When I was earning my degree back in the late 90’s my university filtered the internet. Even in those bygone days traffic filtering was already commonplace. These days it’s fairly common for people to filter their home internet, especially for parents who only want family-friendly content allowed in.
From an organization standpoint it’s important to use some sort of filtering to prevent both unwanted content and behavior from happening in the work place. There are plenty of reasons, but liability is easily one of the most important. Someone viewing illicit or objectionable material in the work place leaves your organization liable for not taking appropriate preventative measures.
Now here’s the thing. Implementing website filtration isn’t hard. In fact, website filtering is pretty standard with most business-class firewalls. The mistake most organizations make is to implement the filtering and then just walk away. The only time the filters and their settings ever get looked at after that is if someone complains, and by then it’s too late.
Electronic security is just like physical security in that it needs to be actively monitored. You need to check on things now and then not just to make sure everything is working as intended, but also to determine if there have been attempts to visit unauthorized sites. If you find that a particular user is consistently trying to get at places they shouldn’t be, then their being blocked is proof your traffic filtering system is working as intended (and that you might need to educate an employee about appropriate workplace browsing).
Even if your filtering is working, knowing that your employees are trying to visit unauthorized websites is useful for an organization to know. That’s why today’s splash of Shakespeare was pulled from ‘Measure for Measure.’ After all, “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.”
If you have any questions about website traffic filtering, please reach out to your TRINUS Account Manager for some stress-free IT.
Be kind,
Courtesy of Your Friendly Neighbourhood Cyber-Man
