While more and more businesses consider the advantages and disadvantages of granting Internet access to their employees, managers are taking note of the ever increasing abuse thereof.  As a shared gateway to the Internet via your web proxy server, the quality of service you experience when browsing the Internet is influenced by where other employees are browsing and what content they are downloading.  No longer are they simply downloading and swapping mp3 audio files but now they are downloading 700Mb DVD films.

The browsing of pornography sites, visiting online chat rooms, gaming, investing, and online shopping are the primary reasons businesses undertake disciplinary measures.  Major concerns for managers include legal liability, security, and reduced worker productivity. The latest business trends show a rise in the number of wrongful termination suits based upon an employer's inability to support accusations of Internet abuse or not having a clear Internet Acceptable Use Policy in place.

According to the Computer Crime and Security Survey conducted by the Computer Security Institute and the FBI, as many as 78 percent of the respondents said they had detected some form of employee abuse over the Internet, including downloading pornography, accessing pirated software or inappropriate use of e-mail. This finding is actually down from the previous year, 2001, when 91 percent of employees were found to have committed similar abuses. However, financial losses due to these employee abuses actually increased, from $35 million (approx. ZAR250 million) to $50 million (approx ZAR357 million).

 

Some examples of how resource accounting and management software can be used include:

• Visits to site type can be recorded and analysed such as whether it was a commercial, network, educational, non-profit, military, government, or other type of site;

• Which domains were visited e.g.: microsoft.com;

• Which counties hosted the visited web sites;

• Determine if the page was downloaded directly from the internet, or was served from a local or upstream proxy server cache;

• Record page download success-to-failure ratio;

• View type of content users are downloading;

• Bill for data sent and received from proxy server & internet.
   

This page was last edited: August 25, 2006 05:09:17 PM