Content Filtering : Protect your Employees Today!

An Urgent Alert To Business Owners

With Employees Using E-mail And The Internet For Work:

Right Now, There Is A Good Chance You Are Paying 90% of Your Employees An $8,600.00 A Year “Bonus” To Download Porn, Search For Another Job, And Infect Your Network With Viruses

Another Monday morning and you look over your office of busy employees hard at work on their computers. What you may not realize is…

§ Angela from sales is searching for another job. She surfs all of your competitor’s sites and uploads her resume to their HR department…

§ John in production is reviewing this weekend’s game highlights play-by-play on his favorite sports news page…

§ Bill in accounting is busy reviewing her portfolio and researching which stocks she should invest in next…

§ Jeff in customer support is making the entire network run slow by downloading huge MP3 files of Mega Death live in concert…

§ Mary, your secretary is accessing her personal hotmail account via your network and accidentally downloading virus carrying e-mails…

§ Dave from shipping is on hotdate.com looking at questionable photos…

So What’s The Harm In A Little Personal Web Surfing And E-mailing Now And Again?

Staggering When You Look At These Alarming Statistics:

§ 73% of employees who use the Internet are fully aware that they are consuming valuable bandwidth and hampering critical business activities with inappropriate Internet usage – but do it anyway.

§ 70% of all Internet porn traffic occurs during the 9-to-5 workday (SexTracker) and 27% of Fortune 500 companies have been accused of sexual harassment stemming from inappropriate e-mail and/or Internet usage. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that companies can be held accountable for their employees forwarding offensive messages and viewing pornography. For example, the Chevron Corporation was ordered to pay $2.2 million to employees over a joke e-mail which they considered offensive.

§ Secret monitoring by the U.S. Treasury Department of Internet use among Internal Revenue Service employees found that activities such as personal e-mail, online chats, shopping and checking personal finances and stocks accounted for 51% of employees' time spent online.

§ According to a survey conducted by Vault.com, 90% of employees use the Internet for personal reasons while at work.

§ 31% of employees accidentally or intentionally send confidential information and trade secrets outside of their organization. The New York Times reported that the stock of Cerner Corp. dipped by 22% after a confidential e-mail from its chief executive chastising his managers was posted on a public site.

Does All of This REALLY Affect You and Your Company?

There are no shortages of studies and reports that talk about soft costs of lowered productivity. As a business owner myself, I consider a lot of this “cowboy math” that is truly hard to quantify. After all, it’s the hard dollars that really matter at the end of the day.

However, if you have employees with unmonitored access to e-mail and the Internet, there are a number of activities they can participate in that are far more damaging than a few hours of lost productivity:

Bandwidth Costs: Heavy graphics, video clips, and audio files are particularly notorious for clogging digital pipelines. If your staff is e-mailing photos of their family vacation to their friends, paying bills online, or downloading music, they are using up a huge amount of expensive bandwidth and slowing down your organization as a result.

Legal Liability: A lawyer at a London firm forwarded an explicit e-mail he received from a female acquaintance to several co-workers as a joke. Unfortunately, they sent it on to a few of their friends and within a short period of time, thousands of people from around the world, including the press, received it. Because of this simple e-mail, this law firm ended up in a huge controversy that hurt their image and credibility.

All it takes is one off-color e-mail to hurt your company’s reputation and land you in an expensive and potentially devastating lawsuit. The US Supreme Court has ruled that companies CAN be held accountable when their employees use the Internet and e-mail inappropriately. To date, 27% of Fortune 500 companies have faced accusations of sexual harassment because they were not properly monitoring and policing employee activities.

Viruses and Internal Security Breaches
Eighty-seven percent (87%) of all viruses enter a company network via e-mail. Even if you have virus protection, employees using free web-based e-mail services like Hotmail and Yahoo can unknowingly introduce dangerous viruses by circumventing your company’s virus scanning software at the gateway.

Another overlooked security threat employee pose is accidentally (or intentionally) sharing confidential files and data to the outside world. Items such as price lists, internal memos, client databases, and business plans can easily find their way into the hands of competitors. Once recent company received a full list of their biggest competitors clients via e-mail when a sales person accidentally carbon copied every recipient into the “to” field.

Another company, France Telecom, accidentally sent an incomplete, rough draft of their financial results one week early. This was a huge financial relations mistake. Accidents like this happen all of the time UNLESS messages sent to the outside world are monitored and filtered for certain keywords.

What You Need To Do Now To Protect Your Organization

At a minimum, there are 2 things you need to do immediately to protect your organization from these disasters. They are:

1. Craft and distribute an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) to all employees. This policy should clearly define:

§ Where employees can and cannot go online.
§ What types of files employees can and cannot download to your network.
§ Appropriate use of company e-mail.
§ When and to what extent they can surf the Internet and use e-mail for personal reasons.
§ Which types of activities are strictly forbidden and…
§ What the consequences are of violating these policies.

2. Set up content filtering software for e-mail and Internet usage. You cannot possibly police all the activities your employees engage in. However, you can automatically enforce a number of the rules outlined in your AUP by installing software that will filter employee access to certain sites and monitor your employee’s activities online, including e-mail.


FREE Employee Usage Audit
Protects You And Your Organization

During the month of August and September of 2008, we will be giving away a FREE employee usage audit to the first 3 companies who contact us from this blog posting.

At no cost or obligation, we will come on site and install a Surf Control demo server that will monitor inappropriate employee usage of the Internet and e-mail, spam, and bandwidth usage.

This simple audit will reveal how much time your employees are spending on non-business related web activities, what sites they are visiting, as well as your exposure to e-mail viruses.

To do this type of audit on your own would cost over $4,000 in hardware and software. However, as a SurfControl reseller, we have a dedicated server in house that we can give you on a trial basis to perform the audit.

By letting us perform the audit for free, you get an easy and accurate way of determining whether or not you even have a problem. If you discover that your employees are “behaving”, we can remove the SurfControl server and you don’t owe us a dime. However, if we discover that inappropriate usage of e-mail and the Internet are affecting your organization, we can help you craft a plan for resolving this situation quickly and cost-effectively.

Regardless of what we discover during our audit, you will be under no obligation to buy anything or to ever use our services again. But don’t delay! Time and staff limitations force us to limit the number of free audits we can give away to three.

How To Secure Your FREE Employee Usage Audit:
Call us today at (281) 377-0981 or email sales@snapstreak.com to schedule your FREE AUDIT TODAY. And remember, to "Manage IT Better" with SnapStreak.