Comments on: Five reasons to implement Internet monitoring in your organization

By: harry

harry — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 05:29:36 +0000

I can’t emphasize how much I agree on these points. I’ve recently been bringing up the idea of monitored internet access within the company, but a lot of the managers are too backward to think that “self-policing” doesn’t cut it anymore.

I’ve actually been criticized (though jokingly, I hope) that I’ve turned into some internet communist. It’s easy to let that kind of humor go, but if the company is at stake, it’s a lot to simply gamble on the staff’s “good will”.

By: Emmanuel Carabott

Emmanuel Carabott — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:10:55 +0000

They go hand in hand. I agree with Leandro in that monitoring by itself will create friction with the employees and can in some cases not be good enough. Some people will find a way to circumvent the system in place and if they don’t know that what they’re doing is wrong they will keep doing it.

Same thing goes for education, even knowing why something is bad some users will still keep doing it, either out of habit or maybe they think that their company is being too paranoid.

Monitoring and Education form a net. Some fish might get through the net but at least it will be a lot less than if you remove 50% of the net itself.

By: Leandro Amore

Leandro Amore — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:29:54 +0000

It’s a fact that we need to restrict access so that we can avoid corporate resources misuse. But, we also know that the users always find creative ways to access these resources bypassing our protections. So really the best way to protect our company is through education. The users need to understand these threats and the related dangers so that they really understand the reason for the IT guys to block access to this kind of resources. If they don’t really get this point, we as administrators always are the “bad guys”, having fun of user’s restrictions.
By this I don’t mean that we should not use content protection systems as GFI, because there are many scams that even the trained user cannot detect, and there is where technology really helps.
Even in a low budget environment we can implement a good security perimeter using free monitoring products as GFI freeware monitoring, which can help us audit our internet activity and users trends and take corrective actions with them.