Anything and everything is now available for free viewing on the internet. Whether you want to Google a question you and a co-worker have been debating about, or whether you just want to keep up with your friends on your favorite social media platform – the internet has endless possibilities to keep you busy. Unfortunately, the temptations of social media, funny cat videos, and other entertaining content is not the best for being efficient in the workplace.
Aside from taking attention away from work, it can also be quite dangerous for the company as a whole. A question that should be on the mind of every business owner is, “How do I ensure my employees are being as productive as possible?” The answer: Web Filtering.
What is Web Filtering?
Web filtering is a way to ensure employees at your company are not visiting sites they shouldn’t be. Web filters screen incoming web content and determine whether it should be displayed/accessed by the user. It does this by checking the website’s contents and comparing these to a set of defined rules that were laid out initially when the filter was added to the network. Also, by not taking up network bandwidth by accessing non-work related sites, employees can enjoy a much faster, efficient network.
How is Web Filtering Helpful to Your Business?
In addition to being an effective way to increase productivity, it also increases network security exponentially. Many of the viruses and malicious programs installed on work computers and servers come from accidental downloads from malicious websites. These sites are easily blocked by web content filtering implementations.
Commonly filtered content includes malicious advertising, pornography, sports, gambling, spyware, viruses, social media, and much more.
Companies can be held liable for the data they access on their internal networks, meaning if one employee views something illegal or incriminating, the entire company can be held responsible. While every business owner would like to believe their employees will never access anything negative to the company, there is no way to be sure they won’t unless proper content filtering is in place.
There are many cases of companies being held completely liable for things such as pornography accessed on their internal network. Needless to say, there are endless amounts of issues that can arise from this liability. If that isn’t enough to convince you of the dangers, there is now a form of ransomware floating around that installs highly illegal pornographic material on a user’s computer. To get this material removed from the computer, you must pay a hefty amount of money to the ransomware creators. This can all be avoided easily with web filtering.
What Are The Available Web Filtering Services?
There are many web filtering services available. There may even be content filtering available on the router you already have on your network. This is something that is starting to be included more in enterprise level routers. There are also many only platforms that include many customizable features such as allowing/blocking specific sites, and key word filtering.
The great thing about most of these services is that they include reporting and logging. This means that whenever you wish, you may look at reports that can tell you which sites your employees are accessing or which ones are being blocked. This is a great way of knowing how users are spending their time.
No network is completely secure without some sort of web content filtering. At Techonsite, we recommend implementing content filtering as soon as possible. This will greatly expand our umbrella of protection over your company’s network and endpoint devices. Contact us to discuss web filtering options.
